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NRF Rating Preparation: Citation resources

This guide provides information and tools for measuring research impact, focusing on the use of citation metrics in NRF rating preparation

Web of Science (WOS)

Web of Science (WOS) is a Clarivate Analytics  product and a citation enhanced database 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 Web of Science Core Collection trademark refers to the collection of resources available in the Clarivate Analytics suite of tools.

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

CITED REFERENCE SEARCH OPTIONS

This option allows you to search for articles that cite a particular author's work.

SEARCH RESULTS FOR THE 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 ia 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 resources, 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

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 research, 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 an individual. The options of limiting to date range, document type and subject area are available. The session's search history is displayed on the lower section of the page.

  • Document 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
  • Affiliations 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 the author, or the source, or part of the reference list or citation resource (Elsevier B.V. 2010:1)

Google Scholar

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 resources, eg. linking to the original article in the publisher archive or publisher webpage
  •  Google Scholar enables partial intra-database linking to the cited and citing sources, but only to HTML and newer versions of PDF documents (Google, 2010:1).

Harzing's Publish or Perish

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 underestimated, as in these disciplines publications in books or book chapters are more likely than in the pure Sciences. 

scite

scite is a tool which offers a quantitative and qualitative insight into how scientific publications cite each other:

  • how many times it was cited by others
  • how it was cited by others by displaying the text where the citation happened from each citing paper
  • whether each citation offers supporting or disputing evidence of the cited claims in the publication of interest, or simply mention it

The scite browser extension shows the tallies of supporting, mentioning, and disputing citations a paper has received when you're browsing on other sites (scite Browser Extension)