Locating Who Cited Your Work

Article citation analysis looks at all of the articles that cite the one that interests you.  It can be a great way to find more research on a particular topic, or to measure an article's quality and impact, as well as trace important research ideas both forwards and backwards. 

Remember that whenever you are searching any of these databases, you are still not getting every citation that may exist because the databases don't include every article, and authors do not cite other authors all in the same way. 

Google Scholar and Web of Science are two great places to start for citation analysis (this page features a comparison between Google Scholar and Web of Science), but many other databases offer this type of search including SciFinder and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. You can also set up a citation alert where you are notified if another article citing the article of interest is published.

In Web of Science, you must be a registered user to create an alert that notifies you when citing articles are published.  To register (a free service), click the "Sign In" link at the top right and choose 'Register'.  Once you have registered and signed in, search for the article of interest and click on the title in the result list.  Use the "Create Citation Alert" link at the right to create the alert.

In Google Scholar, you need to create a public Citations profile (a free service). After you are registered and signed in, choose "Follow new citations" in the right sidebar below the search box.  Google Scholar will notify you when a citing article is published.

There are two ways of finding article citation information in Web of Science, one is more thorough than the other.  If you don't need to find every citation, but rather want to get an overall sense of the importance of the work or find other related research, you can do a basic search for a particular article and look at the "Times Cited" link.  If you need to get as complete a picture as possible of a particular article and the works citing it, you should do a Cited Reference Search.

Web of Science - What Is A Cited Reference Search - approx. 1 minute

Web of Science - How to do a Cited Reference Search - approx. 4 minutes

Go to Web of Science.  We will search for this article: Steinhauser, G. and Klapötke, Thomas M. (2008), “Green” Pyrotechnics: A Chemists' Challenge. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 47: 3330–3347. doi: 10.1002/anie.200704510.

►In the initial search screen, make sure you are searching for "All Databases" to get the widest possible group of citations, then search for either your author, or title of the article, or both.  Web of Science is very particular about how you input your search terms, try not to use any punctuation and make sure to use the drop-down boxes to label your terms.  For instance, if you put the author in the 'Topic' field you may not get any results.

►Once you find your article, click the 'Times Cited' link to see the list of articles that cite the article of interest.

►You can reorder the list of citing articles with the "Sort by" drop-down list, you can 'Save to EndNote online', and look at the "Times Cited' link for each of these articles.

In order to use SciFinder, you must create and register an account, see Fogler's instructions on how to do this.

►To search what articles cited a particular article you are interested in, enter the article title in quotes in the Research Topic box, then click 'Search'.

►Choose the most likely candidate (usually the first in the list) and click "Get References".
►At the far right is a paper icon with an arrow - click this for "Citing References".

►Visit the 'Tools' link and 'Remove Duplicates', then check the box at the top of the list to select all, so that you can use the links at the top right to 'Save', 'Print', or 'Export'.

► Go to Google Scholar, where we will use this article to demonstrate how to find citing publications:  Woolf, A. (2000). Witchcraft or mycotoxin? The Salem witch trials. Clinical Toxicology, 38(4), 457-460.  Search for the article title.      

►The "Cited by" will show how many times this article has been cited and, if you click on it, by which publications.

Many databases let you track down articles citing your article of interest.  Links you may see could be called "Cited By", "Citing Articles" or "Times Cited".  Do not get these confused with links named "Citations", "Cited References" or even just "References" which usually refer to the list of articles your article used.  (If you need to search for patents, take a look at Fogler's Patent and Trademark Resource Center!)