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CITED REFERENCE SEARCHING
"By using the authors' references in compiling the citation index, we are in reality utilizing an army of indexers, for every time an author makes a reference he is in effect indexing that work from his point of view." Eugene GarfieldWhat is cited reference searching?
Cited references are the articles, books or other materials listed in a bibliography or as works cited in a particular publication. Because citation databases index each reference, it is possible to search these cited references. One can follow a particular cited reference, or cited author, forward in time to find more current articles that have also cited that author or work.
What are impact factors?
Impact factor for journal X= The number of citations in a given year, to all articles published in journal X for the previous two years, divided by the number of articles in that journal for those previous two years.
Why use cited reference searching?
- To locate current research based on earlier research
- To find out how many times and where a publication is being cited
- To find out who is citing a particular paper
- To find out how a particular research topic is being used to support other research
- To track the history of a research idea
- To track the research history of a researcher
- To determine how well your own published research is cited for promotion/tenure considerations
Where do I find cited reference searching?
Cited reference searching is included in the following:
Cited References for Articles
- Scopus (all disciplines; comprehensive)
- Google Scholar (all disciplines; comprehensive)
- Academic Search Complete (all disciplines)
- America: History and Life
- Biological Abstracts
- Business Source Premier
- CINAHL (nursing)
- Communication and Mass Media Complete
- Food Science and Technology Abstracts
- Historical Abstracts
- IEEE Xplore
- Library Information Science and Technology Abstracts
- PsycINFO
- PubMed
- SciFinder Scholar
- Social Services Abstracts
- Social Work Abstracts
- Sociological Abstracts
- Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
Cited references for Books
What should concern you about cited reference searching and impact factors?
- Impact factors may play too important role in hiring and tenure decisions
- Citation rates and impact factors vary widely from field to field and shouldn't be taken at face value, but considered relative to the field of research
- Citation rate may be based on a few prolific authors citing each other, including self citations
- Citation searching works better for journal articles than books
- Cross-disciplinary research may produce fewer citations
- Coverage of your particular field in the citation database may be weak
- The research may too recent and not widely known, like emerging fields
- Impact factors refer to the journal as a whole, not to individual papers
- The quality of the journal producing the citation
- Distribution of the citations over time might be more indicative of their importance than the immediacy of the impact factor
- There is a growing tendency of some researchers to go after topics likely to get into high-impact journals, which jeopardizes creativity, can skew the course or even slow the pace of science
- Some journals also cite articles in editorials, reviews news and other non-research articles to increase the number of cites and thus increase the impact factor of the journal
- There is no guarantee that every paper which ought to be cited will be cited. An un-cited author may be ahead of his peers. Mendel and his genetics work went unappreciated for years
Where do I find the most cited journals in my field and their impact factors?
Journal Citation Reports (also known as JCR)