LibGuides: ESL Graduate Student Guide: Citation Analysis

Citation Analysis

In your scholarly research, you may need to gauge the importance of a publication by counting the number of times it has been cited by other scholars. This is called citation analysis. You may also want to find all published works by a specific scholar (such as an advisor or professor).

See the Cited Reference Searching guide for information on how to view how many times a publication has been cited using tools like Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar.

Research Metrics

Research metrics attempt to show the impact, influence, and importance of researchers (authors), journals, and articles.

If you get an error message when trying to connect to these databases, please try an incognito window.

Understanding Impact: Impact Factor and Other Research Metrics
This guide will help you identify standard research metrics that are used to measure scholarly impact. This guide also outlines methods and tools you can use to identify journals in your field for publishing.

Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window
The Impact Factor of a journal in a particular year is published in Journal Citation Reports.
Web of Science (Core Collection) This link opens in a new window
You can perform cited reference searches for article-level metrics in the Web of Science. Cited reference searches let you see how many articles have cited a given article.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
Find author-, article-, and journal-level metrics in Scopus. Tends to cover the physical and life sciences more strongly than the social sciences.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar offers author-level metrics as well as a cited reference search option (click on the triple bar in the upper left-hand corner of the screen).

If you would like to learn more about how to utilize Google Scholar in your research, check out our Google For Academic Research guide.