In this guide we suggest tools that let you:
Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets or one stop shops - you need to use a number of tools to cover all bases.
Citation tracking, or citation analysis is an important tool used to trace scholarly research, measure impact, and inform tenure and funding decisions.It looks at the number of times that a work has been cited in the bibliographies of other works.
The impact of an article is evaluated by counting the number of times other authors cite it in their work. A high number of citations usually indicates a highly regarded work, but it can also indicate a well-known but controversial work to which a number of authors have referred.
Researchers do citation analysis for several reasons:
The output from citation studies is often the only way that non-specialists in governments and funding agencies, or even those in different scientific disciplines, can judge the importance of a piece of scientific research.
Different databases offer the opportunity to sort by number of citations, to investigate patterns, create graphs and maps to provide a visual depiction of these citation patterns, to search within citations and to examine journal rankings.
The Department of Higher Education has accredited journals listed on Web of Science and the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences as well as its own list of South African titles.
Each of the databases have their own internal help facilities that you can access. To access a specific database, go to the Databases A-Z list and click directly on the first letter of the database name.
Or ask your subject librarian for assistance.
This libguide is based on similar guides from the Sheridan Libraries at John Hopkins University and the University Library at the University of Melbourne and University of Waterloo Library.
With grateful thanks and acknowledgements.