Transcript Citation Searching with Web of Knowledge

Citation Searching with
Web of Knowledge
Roger Mills
[email protected]
Catherine Dockerty
[email protected]
OULS Bio- and Environmental Sciences
These slides are available on
http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser
Overview of Session
• What is citation indexing
• Why is it useful
• How to use it on Web of Science
• Citation searching on other products
• Setting up alerts and organising your references with
RefWorks or EndNote
Citation indexing
• Invented in 1961 by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for
Scientific Information (ISI)
• Scientific abstracting/indexing services began in nineteenth
century, recording author/title/publisher/source etc for
articles and indexing them
• Garfield added details of all references quoted in the article
and indexed them too, publishing results as Science
Citation Index (SCI) – originally only in printed form
• Allowed for many new ways of linking articles
Exciting new ways
• For an article you’ve read:
• Find earlier articles that one was based on
• Find later articles which quoted it
• Find related articles which quote some of the same
references as this one
• So you can trace the progress of ideas backwards,
sideways and, uniquely, forwards in time
And
• You can identify which journals publish most highly-cited
articles – the notorious ‘impact factor’
• Publishing your work in high-impact journals is important in
getting funding!
• Bibliometric analysis to be used in next research
assessment exercise (REF)
also
• Discover who is citing your research, or that of a colleague,
or noted authority
• Identify sources of information that competitors are
consulting for their research
• Construct an objective history of a field of study, significant
invention, or discovery
Originally
• Using the paper Science Citation Index was
hard work
• Now, the electronic version is much quicker to
use
• But can be complex and confusing – important
to understand what it does and doesn’t do
• Caveat emptor!
• SCI now has competitors, but all work slightly
differently – e.g. Scopus, Google Scholar
• The basic concept of linking documents which
cite each other, and ranking them according to
the frequency with which they do so, underpins
search engines like Google
Want to know more?
• Wikipedia is a good source – try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_index
In the real world
• Science Citation Index is part of Web of Science, which
includes Social Science Citation Index and Arts and
Humanities Citation Index, and also now Conference
Proceedings
• Web of Science is a product offered on the platform Web
of Knowledge (WoK), alongside other products including
Journal Citation Reports which gives journal impact factors.
• Direct access available on Oxford network; outside Oxford
log in using SSO
Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
• For Sciences and Social Sciences
• This is a measure of the frequency with which the "average
article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The
impact factor will help you evaluate a journal's relative
importance, especially when you compare it to others in the
same field
• From within a record you can click on Journal Citation
Reports to view the impact factor of the journal
• Or you can view and compare impact factors of all journals
within your subject area
Other services offering citation searching - SCOPUS
• Sciences and Social Sciences
• Results include journal articles and web pages
• Each reference to a paper shows the number of times an
article has been cited
Citation searching in Google Scholar
• References include ‘cited by’ data based on articles known
to Google Scholar
• Entries ranked by number of cites
• Not possible to save sets or analyse
• Still useful for tracking research
Citation searching
• Is very useful
• Should be used with care
• Excellent for keeping up with new articles and people
• Bibliometrics is an art not a science!
• For further help contact your subject librarian – see
http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/libraries/subjects/librarians