Subject Guides: Locating Who Cited Your Work: Home

The Caveats

►You need to assume that each database contains only a portion of the complete citation record for article and authors

►It is often difficult to separate individual authors with common last names

►The arts and humanities are not represented as well as the sciences and social sciences

►It is difficult to compare analysis results across different fields

Citation Analysis - The Basics

Citation analysis is looking at which authors use which articles as references in their own publications. It uses citation data to see the impact or assumed quality of an author, article, or journal. There are several different types of citation reports you can generate. You can see:

Article Citations - what other articles cite a specific article or work
Author Citations - how often an author's work has been cited by others
Journal Impact Factor - which journal is publishing the most cited articles

Measuring Scholarly Impact

Scholarly impact can refer to several aspects of scholarly communication. Most commonly:

Journal Impact is the amount of times articles from a specific journal are cited combined with the number of articles that the journal publishes - this is known as the impact factor.
H-index measures scholarly impact at the author level - the amount of articles a scholar published combined with how many times those published articles are cited creates your h-index.
Eigenfactor is intended to measure the overall importance of a scientific journal. Similar to the journal impact factor, the Eigenfactor was developed to be a more robust tool, and considers how broad the journal's contribution is.

Measuring Scholarly Impact by Ying Ding (Editor); Ronald Rousseau (Editor); Dietmar Wolfram (Editor)
ISBN: 9783319103778
Publication Date: 2014-01-01

Journal Citation Reports
Allows the user to evaluate and compare the impact of journals in many different fields, including education. Requires login with UMaine account.
Eigenfactor
The eigenfactor metric, and tool, was developed by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom at the University of Washington. Search by journal name to find its eigenfactor.
Google Scholar Citations
To find your h-index you must create a Google Profile and have a Gmail account. Google Scholar Citations then collects your publishing and citation information and creates your h-index. You can choose whether to make your profile Public or Private. When searching for others authors' h-index Google Scholar only gives access to authors who have created a public profile.

If you'd like to visualize citation connections...

There are several websites that visually map citation information, including VOSviewer.com, Well-Formed, and Web of Science, which has a "View Citation Map" feature.

If you can't get enough of citation analysis...

Chronicle of Higher Education
Search for "citation analysis" to see current articles on how this topic is viewed in higher education settings, and the broader issue of scholarly publishing.
Show Me the Data
A critique of the impact factor and its use. Mike Rossner, et. al. Journal of Cell Biology, December 2007
Citation Statistics
A 2008 report on the use and abuse of using citation analysis to judge research.
Altmetrics
Altmetrics is the use of alternative, or nontraditional, measurements to better understand the extent of a work's scholarly impact. Altmetrics serve as a complement to traditional metrics (e.g., citation counts) by incorporating statistics regarding usage, capture, and mentions of scholarly works in online environments. Contact your subject librarian to learn more.