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University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Cited Reference Searching

This guide shows users how to view how many times a publication has been cited–sometimes called citation analysis–using tools like Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar.

About This Tool

Google Scholar provides a simple and broad way to search for scholarly literature. You can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web sites.

Searching in Google Scholar

To make a cited reference search in Google Scholar:

  1. Navigate to Google Scholar - make sure you are actually in Google Scholar, not just a normal Google search.
  2. Select Advanced Scholar Search by clicking the arrow on the right-hand side of the search field.
    This image is a screenshot of the Google Scholar homepage.
  3. In Advanced Scholar Search, enter information about the article. For example, we can search for the title "Quantum Measurement" in the "with all of the words" search field. Then, we can enter A.J. Leggett as the author in the field "Return Articles authored by."
    This image is a screenshot of the Google Scholar advanced search.
  4. In the search results there will be a "Cited by" link beneath the article citation that shows the number of sources Google Scholar found citing the article.
    This image is a screenshot of an article in the results page. The "Cited by" link underneath the article abstract is highlighted.
     
  5. Clicking on the "Cited by" link gives a list of articles that have cited the article.
    This image is a screenshot of the Google Scholar results list.

 

Note: Google Scholar will likely produce more cited references than either Web of Science or Scopus, but some of these may be duplicates. Google does not provide a complete list of all the publications it indexes, so it is difficult to know if Google Scholar provides comprehensive citation counts.