As an early career researcher in Africa, I have to confess that I occasionally check my Researchgate and Google Scholar to see how many citations my papers are getting. I also get excited when I get a notification about one of my papers getting cited or read. My citation index shows that my research is having an impact. Here are a few facts about citation indexes.
A Guide to Citation Indexes
A citation index is a database that tracks how often publications such as journal articles have been cited in other research. This allows researchers to see the impact of specific articles, authors or journals over time.
Citation indexes can help to measure impact based on citation counts and patterns (i.e. where the research is being cited), find related articles using keywords, track trends and evolution of research fields (e.g. which topics are getting cited), and evaluate individual author performance and journal quality using impact factors and h-indexes. We spoke in a previous article about what is considered a good index for an early career researcher in various fields.
Some of the main citation indexes to know about include:
Scopus
This is the largest abstract and citation database for peer-reviewed literature. Scopus offers comprehensive coverage of scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences literature, along with citation analysis tools.
Web of Science
This covers a wide range of disciplines and provides citation data for various types of publications. WOS offers exceptionally strong indexing for the hard sciences such as physics and biology.
Google Scholar
Provides a broad index of scholarly articles, theses, books, and conference papers, along with citation counts. Google Scholar is excellent for accessing and discovery of scholarly literature and covering international scholarly material but does not provide as many author level metrics as databases such as Scopus and Web of Science.
PubMed
This database is focused on life sciences and biomedical topics, it includes citation data for a wide range of medical literature. It is not recommended for non-STEM research due to its specific focus.
Dimensions
A comprehensive research database that includes citation data along with links to funding information and clinical trials. Dimensions also provides patent information and access to grey literature, and has a free version that is excellent for finding and exporting citations.
CrossRef
This database is primarily used for linking scholarly content and DOI registration, it also provides citation information. Crossref provides additional services such as plagiarism screening, which helps uphold research integrity.
A number of other citation indexes exist but have not been covered here, including Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI).
Conclusion
Citation indexes are a useful tool to determine the impact and popularity of research articles, researchers or journals. They are also used by some institutions in the promotion process for academics based on the impact of their research.
While no one citation index provides information on all the uses of an article or book, they provide a useful snapshot of that articles impact.
