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Measuring Your Impact: Journal Rankings, Citation Analysis, and Other Metrics

Tools and methods for measuring the impact of an individual or their scholarshipp

Web of Science

When analyzing the pattern of citation for a particular author, article, journal or institution, it is critical to use the Cited Reference Search.

To find the citation counts to your own articles:

  • Select Cited Reference Search
  • Select the Researchers tab
  • Enter your name (and any variants) in the format indicated & click on search
  • The resulting list of matching publications includes the total number of citing articles for each publication
  • To create a detailed citation report, select all appropriate articles & click View as a Combined Record
  • The result will be a list of all papers by the author with information about citations
  • For additional information, click View Citation Report in the right navigation bar

Access (Berry College users only)

Cited Reference Searching

From the SIGMETRICS listserv, discussion of the importance of using a Cited Reference Search:

  1. A regular WOS search for this paper [Infection dynamics on scale-free networks, R. M. May and A. L. Lloyd, Physical Review E 64, 066112 (2001)] says that it was cited 72 times between 2001 and 2007, but zero times after that. This looked odd to me, so I did a "cited reference search" for the same paper, which reveals what the problem is. In cited reference search, the citations for this paper are divided between two variants (as is often the case with cited reference search), with one variant corresponding to the main WOS entry (the one with 72 citations), and the other not. Both variants are correct in this case (no typos).  The only difference I can see is that the main WOS entry uses an abbreviated journal name "PHYS REV E", while the variant entry uses the full journal name "Physical Review E". Other than that they appear to be basically the same. But here's the issue: the "variant" entry has 209 citations -- by far the majority of citations to this paper, and all citations after 2007. In other words a straightforward search for this paper in WOS misses almost all (74 percent) of citations. This is just one example paper, but I have found a number of other similar examples." (Mark Newman)
     
  2. The problem is so severe and so well-known that I actually coined a name for such variants in citation data and have used it in several publications: "allonyms." For example, in Web of Science data the information scientist Karen Sparck Jones appears as both "Jones KS" and Sparckjones K." Henry Small is cited as both "Small H" and as "Small HG," sometimes in the same paper. It seemed to me that the term was needed because such variants are not really synonyms in the usual linguistic sense. Allonyms occur in names of journals and books, as well as authors, throughout citation indexes. (Howard White)

Limitations

  • Berry's subscription does not include citations of your work in articles published before 2005 (more recent citations of your publications from before 2005 will be included).
  • Berry's subscription includes only the Science Citation Index, so journals in the social sciences, arts, and humanities are not covered.
  • Some areas of study are under-represented even in the sciences
  • Only journals that are heavily cited tend to be included, which means it has limited utility for fields in which core scholarship is less concentrated in a relatively small set of journals.
  • Almost all of the journals and other works are in English & published in Western Europe and the U.S.
  • Citations to articles in books are generally absent.
  • There are citations from journals that publish original research as well as from review journals, each of which have very different citation patterns and behavior.