Assess Your Research Impact

Citation analysis is a useful method to understand the influence of articles. However, it is important to keep several things in mind:

• Citation performance is best assessed by field-normalized citation rates or percentile ranks, which account for disciplinary differences in citation patterns and rates.
• Citation counts can be misleading (for example, negative citations that are critical of the cited article are counted the same as positive citations) or manipulated (for example, through self-citation).
• Citation errors (such as a citation including the wrong year of publication or misspelling the author's name) can result in citations being missing from results.
• Metrics tools and platforms use different sources for citation data and may have different criteria for what articles or citations they include, leading them to report different citation metrics. For example, the total number of citations for the same publication is likely to be different in Web of Science versus Google Scholar.

Sources for article citation data and metrics include:

Article citation data may also be provided by publishers. For example, the publisher PLOS includes citation data for each article it publishes, as well as article views, saves, and shares.

On the full record page of any article in Web of Science, you can view the article's citation counts in the Citation Network panel.

Cited Reference Search

If you have published articles in journals that are not indexed in Web of Science, you can use the Cited Reference Search to understand how your article has been cited. You can also search for your books, book chapters, conference proceedings, patents, and thesis or dissertation—so long as these items were cited in an article indexed by Web of Science.

The Cited Reference Search can also identify "citation variants," or citations that are not included in an article's citation count because of incorrect information provided by the citing author.

Cited Reference Search Tips

1. Perform a Cited Reference Search with as little information as possible, such as the author name and the cited work (i.e. the journal title), to help catch any incorrect citations.
2. When searching for journals and other publication titles in the "Cited Work" field, be sure to use either the "View list of abbreviations" or the "Select from Index" feature to find the correct abbreviation used by Web of Science (demonstrated in the video below).
3. Use asterisks in the "Cited Author" and "Cited Work" fields to help catch any incorrect citations. Using the example from the video below, you would enter the author's name as Eriksson H* and the cited work as nurs* inq*