Research Skills: Types of Citation Resources

Web of Science (WOS) is an ISI Thomson product aimed at producing an abstract and citation resource with a large variety of peer-reviewed literature such as scholarly journal articles, reports and conference proceedings. It includes analytic tools to track and analyse research and caters for the Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Arts and Humanities.

The ISI Web of Knowledge trademark refers to the collection of resources available in the ISI suite of tools:

• Web of Science (Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index)
• Conference Proceedings Citation Index (Science and Social Science & Humanities)
• Journal Citation Reports - JCR
• Analytical tools

CITED REFERENCE SEARCH OPTIONS:

This option allows you to search for articles that cite a particular author’s work. WOS allows the following search options: author, publication year and source title.

SEARCH RESULTS FOR WEB OF SCIENCE

The search results are listed in a short view format with the following fields: title (hypertext link), author, source, volume, issue, page, publisher and citations. The option to refine search results includes the ability to refine within the search results, the subject areas, document types, authors, source titles, and publications. Hypertext linking is a feature which allows for access between web pages within the resource and from the resource to another resource via hypertext linking and software protocol. 

• WOS allows for inter-database linking to the cited and citing sources, eg. linking to the original article in the publisher’s archive or webpage
• WOS allows for intra-database linking to the cited and citing sources, eg. linking to other scholarly articles related to the author, the source or part of the reference list and part of the citation resource

Scopus is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles. Search options available to the user are arranged in tabs which include: basic search, author search, affiliation search and advanced search. The analytics option represents the citation analysis tools on Scopus. The next three options represent the personalised manipulation features Scopus supplies to users who register and login as individual. The options of limiting to date range, document type and subject area are available. The sessions search history is displayed on lower section of the page.   

• Basic search: enter your search term after deciding on the topic of research, eg. Zachman Framework
• Author Search: enter the author’s name to retrieve items published by the author, eg. Zachman
• Affiliation Search: enter the author’s affiliation, eg. Unisa or University of Pretoria, to retrieve all institution affiliated items 

CITED REFERENCE SEARCH OPTIONS:

Scopus allows the following search options: author, publication year, article title, source title and page number.

Hypertext linking is a feature which allows for access between web pages within the resource and from the resource to another resource via hypertext linking and software protocol.

• Scopus allows for inter-database linking to the cited and citing sources, eg. linking to the original article in the publisher archive or publisher webpage
• Scopus also enables intra-database linking to the cited and citing sources by linking to other scholarly articles related to the author, or the source, or part of the reference list or citation resource (Elsevier B.V., 2010:1)

Google Scholar is not as sophisticated as the other citation databases when doing a citation analysis – look out for duplicates and different versions of the same article being cited.

Hypertext linking is a feature which allows for access between web pages within the resource and from the resource to another resource via hypertext linking and software protocol.

• Google Scholar allows for inter-database linking to the cited and citing sources, eg. linking to the original article in the publisher archive or publisher webpage
• GS enables partial intra-database linking to the cited and citing sources, but only to HTML and newer versions of PDF documents - older PDF documents are not accessible (Google, 2010:1)

Google Scholar does not have citation analysis capabilities at present.

Publish or Perish is a free software programme that retrieves and analyses academic citations.  It uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain raw citations, then analyses these. It presents statistics on Hirsch's h-index and related parameters. Publish or Perish is designed to empower individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage, especially when working in a small field or publishing mainly in books. Citation metrics in the Social Sciences and Humanities will always be under estimated, as in these disciplines publications in books or book chapters are more likely than in the Sciences