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Citation Analysis
Version 2 - 3/7/02
Goal
To convey the concept that writings can have an impact on others,
and to learn how to determing this impact through citations.
Notes
- Some libraries offer access to the on-line citation databases.
This is best. (Rutgers Newark is an example.) Others will only
have printed analysis books. These are often not up-to-date. (NJIT
is an example.)
- You can do a citation analysis at many major public and
university libraries, but not all. If you are near campus, you
should use Rutgers Newark's library. If you live at a distance,
you will need to contact libraries in your area to determine where
you can perform your citation search.
- You will have to do several citation analyses across the
semester. You may decide it most efficient to do all of these at
once if you live a distance from a library that offers this
service.
- If your article is less than 18 months old it is extremely
unlikely that it will register in the citation databases.
Therefore you do not need to search the Sciece and Social Science
databases for its citations (as described below). Instead you only
need to search the library's other databases and the World Wide
Web for citations (as described further below).
Page Contents
Supplemental Materials (not on this page)
Citation Analysis
Researchers do a citation analysis for several reasons:
- to find out how much impact a particular article has had, by
showing which other authors based some work upon it or cited it as
an example within their own papers
- to determine more about a field or topic (by reading the
papers that cite a seminal work in that area)
- to find out how much impact a particular author has had (by
looking at his/her total citations)
For articles in the field of Information Systems we need to search
two citation indexes: the Science Citation Index and the Social
Sciences Citation Index. These indexes only cover journal articles.
Therefore we also must search some on-line databases and the World
Wide Web to find citations in conference proceedings, workshop
proceedings, and technical reports.
How Many Citations Should You Get?
If your article has more than 20 citations, you only need to
include a selection of them. You will need to state the total number
of citations the article has. Then list 1-2 citations for each year
in which the article has been cited. Try to include citations from
several different journals.
Citation Search on the Science and
Social Science Databases
Currently, the best place to do a citation analysis is at one of
Rutgers' libraries (http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/),
such as the Dana Library on Bleeker Street between University Avenue
and MLK Blvd. just down from NJIT.
There you can do an electronic citation search for the years 1994
forward. Only Rutgers students can access this service off-site
through the Internet. Non-Rutgers students must go to the library
itself.
The citation database goes back to the year 1994. For anything
posted before 1994 you need to do the physical book search.
Therefore, if your article was written before 1994, then you will
have to look in the printed citation indexes for the citations in
each year before 1994.
Rutgers has a full set of the printed indexes. NJIT's library only
has the Science citation index.
Electronic Citation Index Search
- Choose a computer to work with, if you want it to print, which
is free, you must choose one that is connected to the printer. You
otherwise can e-mail yourself the search results.
- On the computer click on Netscape and the navigator opens
automatically to http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/
- On the Rutgers Library Home Page, choose
Indexes
- On Indexes Home Page under the left column "Indexes by Title"
choose Websciences
- Under Websciences choose connect to Web
version
- You will now be at Websciences Home Page
- Choose full search
- This brings you to Citation Search Page which has a number of
fields:
- in upper left hand corner are 3 fields for the different
citation indexes, if you want to search all three, just leave
blank, and all will be searched. It is recommended that you
search all three.
- fill in cited author using the following: Last Name First
Initial followed by *, this will search all the variations of
the first name listing
- fill in year of article searching about
- no need to fill in journal name
- when finished choose look up
- Now displayed will be the number of hits per list of
references for the author, and the year. It should be noted that
the same citation might be represented in a number of different
formats. The librarian reminds us that authors spend the least
amount of time doing the bibliography; therefore the search engine
will pick up any slight variation in the article's bibliography
notation as a separate reference.
- Choose the references that pertain to the article you are
searching about - an author may have published more than one paper
that year. Do not choose "select all" unless all are the same
reference. Then choose search.
- What follows is the Cited Reference Search Results
Summary, all the hits that contain the reference. Also
reviewed under this title is the exact search you performed, and
at the bottom of the first page is the total number of
citations.
- At the middle of each page are two choice fields, mark all and
submit. You must choose the citations you want; for most you can
just mark all. You must do this for each page
separately, but do not choose submit until all the pages are
marked.
- After "marking" all the pages, choose
submit.
- Then in the upper left-hand corner choose the field
marked list. This provides all the citations in
bibliography form.
- At this point you may be finished, unless you want other
information e.g., cited references which shows all the references
used in the citation of which you can confirm your original
article is there, or maybe times cited, publisher, etc. At the
bottom of the "marked list" you can select these fields.
- After completing this you either format to print, save to a
disk or e-mail to yourself. Just remember that if you expanded the
citation references beyond simple bibliography form, the file may
be very large and might overwhelm your e-mail mailbox.
- This ends the electronic citation search, just remember for
articles prior to 1994 you will have to go to the hard copy
citation indexes.
This concludes your first step, the electronic citation
search.
For articles published prior to 1994, you must also look through
the hard copy citation indexes.
And for all articles you should do a database and Web search.
Hardcopy Citation Index Search
- Recall that there are three citation indexes:
- Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded)
- Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)
- Arts, Humanities Citation Index A+CHI)
- IS citations spread across the first two indexes.
- Each index has three books:
- Citation Index
- Source Index
- Permuterm Subject
- For our purposes we only need the first two.
- Go to the Citation Index first. Look up your author, find the
article, and below it you will find the list of citations listing
author and journal title.
- To obtain the full citation you must then go to the Source
Index, looking up the citation's author.
- Here you will find the complete bibliography for the
citation
- The list of all citations used by the author
- You should confirm that your original article is in this
list
- In front of each book is an example with interpretation of
each symbol for the citation index or source index
Supplemental Materials:
Citation Search within the Library's
Other On-Line Databases
Several of the on-line databases include full-text articles from
conference and workshop proceedings. You can access these databases
on-line on campus or through NJIT's virtual private network. See
http://www.library.njit.edu/.
These databases include:
- ACM Digital Library
- IEEE Electronic Library
You should do a keyword search in each of these on-line databases
for the author and title. Be sure to enter these as *keywords*, not
author and title. Why? Because we want to find these when they are
listed in the reference section of the articles that cite your
paper.
Add the full bibliographic reference of the articles citing yours
to your list.
Supplemental Materials:
Citation Search on the World Wide
Web
Lastly, you should look on the Web for any articles (conference
papers, workshop papers or technical reports) that cite your target
article.
Try the following search engines, plus any other good ones you
come across:
- http://www.google.com
- http://www.altavista.com
- http://www.northernlight.com
At the site's opening page type in the unique part of the
article's title in quotation marks, or with + signs in-between each
word. You might also add the author's last name preceded by plus
sign. (Look at the advanced search instructions, which vary from site
to site.)
You will have to check each result to see if it is in the
reference section of an article, and not simply a listing.
Add the URL of the article to your list, and if you can find it,
the full bibliographic reference of that article.
Note: You might narrow your search to one of the sub-topics
usually listed, e.g., computers or computer science. But only do this
if the regular search produces too many references to validate.
Non-Article Web Citations
Also for a Web search, you can find "citations" that are not
within articles. For each of the item you find through a Web search,
please note how your target article is referenced (i.e., "list of
Productivity Paradox information" or "White Paper" or "XXX's research
site"). Exclude any site under the control of an author of your
target article or his/her employers. These references also show that
the target article potentially had/could have some kind of
impact.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Barry Evans, a CIS677 participant, and the
reference librarian, Ms. Tipton at Rutgers Dana Library for putting
together this information.
last updated: 3/7/2002 - Version 2 (with many
clarifications)
This page: http://ccsweb.njit.edu/~bieber/CIS677S02/citation-analysis.html
To comment on this Web site, please email bieber
@ homer.njit.edu