1. Web of Science2. Google Scholar3. Alternative Methods
1. Using Journal Citation Reports2. Alternative Sources for Journal Rankings
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Citation Research 

How to find citation counts for your publications and how to find journal rankings.
Last update: Oct 19th, 2009 URL: http://libguides.asu.edu/citation  Print Guide  RSS Updates

3. Alternative Methods            Print Page
  
 

Introduction

Certain disciplines, journals, and document types may not be well represented in the more traditional sources for citation analysis, such as Web of Science.  In this situation, it becomes necessary to find alternative sources for locating citations to an author or published work.  This page identifies potential alternative sources grouped by their database search interface since each of the sources within a group would have a common search strategy for extracting citation information. 

Click on any option below to go to the information for that source:

 

ACM Guide to Computing Literature

Database Description:

  • ACM Guide to Computing Literature - covers computing literature from the Association of Computing Machinery and many other publishers.  Includes books, journal articles, conference proceedings, doctoral dissertations, master's theses, and technical reports.

Directions:

  1. Search for an author or title to be cited.
  2. Be sure "expanded form" has been selected for the "Display results" option.
  3. Click on "Cited by" in the "Additional Information" section of the desired search result entries to see if any other publications in the database cite them.
 

CSA Illumina Databases

Database Descriptions:

Directions:

  1. Search for the author or article title to be cited.
  2. Look for items in the search results that have "Cited by [number]" at the bottom of the entry, after the "View Record" and "References" links, indicating they have been cited by other articles in the CSA databases.
  3. Click on the "Cited by" link to see the articles from the CSA databases within the same disciplinary group (Social Sciences, Engineering and Materials, Natural Sciences, or APA Psyc... databases) that are citing the original source.
 

EBSCOhost Databases

Database Descriptions:

  • Academic Search Premier - covers articles from a broad spectrum of disciplines as well as general popular periodicals. Cited references begin in 2002.
  • America: History and Life - covers articles, book chapters, and books on the history and culture of the United States and Canada. Cited references begin 11/28/2007.
  • Communication and Mass Media Complete - covers articles on communication and mass media. Cited references begin 6/9/2005.
  • EconLit - covers articles, book chapters, and books in all areas of economics. Cited references begin 6/18/2007.
  • Environment Index - covers articles on the environment and environmental policy. Cited references begin June 2003.
  • Historical Abstracts - covers articles, book chapters, and books on the history of the world (excluding the U.S. and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Cited references begin 11/28/2007.

Directions:

  1. Click on "Cited References" in the navigation bar across the top.
  2. Search for the author or article title to be cited.
  3. Check the box next to each relevant item in the results that has a "Times Cited in this Database" link.
  4. Click the "Find Citing Articles" button at the top of the results to see the articles that are citing the original source.
 

Espacenet's Worldwide Patent Database

Database Description:

  • Espacenet - a worldwide patent database developed and maintained by the European Patent Office containing patent information for over 80 countries and patenting agencies.  This is not a complete database of all the world's patents and while some of the patents databases are available in full text, others only have bibliographic information plus an abstract.

Directions:

To see if a patent has been cited by other patents:

  1. Go to Espacenet
  2. In the left column, click on patent number search
  3. Keep the database selection set to "Worldwide"
  4. Put the patent number in the patent number box (if necessary, include the two letter country code immediately before the number if too many results are retrieved from a plain number search)
  5. On the results list, click on the title of the patent to display the bibliographic data screen
  6. On the bibliographic data screen, click on the red "View list of citing documents" which should be near the middle of the screen.
 

Full Text Journal Collections

Database Descriptions:

  • HighWire Press - hosts almost 1200 journals from over 140 scholarly publishers with emphasis on the life sciences.
  • JSTOR - covers past years of scholarly journals in all disciplines, cutting off at volumes published one to five years ago.
  • Project Muse - covers approximately 400 humanities and social sciences journals representing over 60 scholarly publishers.
  • SpringerLink - covers over 1900 full text scholarly journals published by Springer.
  • Wiley InterScience - covers 1400 full text scholarly journals published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Directions:

These full-text journal collections do not provide a special search option for finding citing articles or show links to citing articles.  But since the full text of the articles also includes the references, it is possible to search for citations using basic keyword searching methods.

Be Aware: Each of these collections has a somewhat different search mechanism, so the directions given here have been written in general terms that then must be applied to the specific search entry requirements of a given collection. 

  1. Search the full text articles, including the references, for the author last name and the article title to be cited using the advanced search option if available.
  2. If necessary, enclose the title words in quotations to force searching as a phrase.
  3. Do not limit the search to the author or title fields.
  4. Take advantage of any search functions that allow you to limit to document type or other feature that would help exclude non-relevant material.
  5. Scan the results for citing references from other authors ignoring hits on the original article and self citations.
 

IEEE Xplore

Database Description

IEEE Xplore contains almost 2 million articles and papers from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineer's (IEEE) journals and conference proceedings.  The subject of "Electrical Engineering" is broadly defined here and articles may be found from all areas of engineering in which electronics may be applied.   IEEE Xplore's citation information only covers what other IEEE publications are citing each other. 

Directions:

  1. Find the article your interested in (search by author, title, etc.),
  2. Click on the "Abstract Plus" link under the article title,
  3. Scroll the page down to the last category which is "Citing Documents",
  4. Citations listed here are IEEE journal articles or conference papers that cite this item.
 

MathSciNet

Database Description:

  • MathSciNet indexes the mathematical literature and has a special search features called "Author Citations". "The Citation Database is based on the information contained in reference lists drawn from certain journals covered by MathSciNet. Reference lists in all of the journals covered in the Citation Database go back to a publication year of 2000. A smaller number of journals have reference lists in MathSciNet back to 1997."  For more details, see the MR Citation database guide.

Directions:

  • Click on the "Author Citations" tab at the top of the search box
  • Enter either the author's "lastname" or "lastname, firstinitial" in the search box
  • If more than one author matches the search, click on the scroll arrow in the box and select the appropriate author (you will only be able to select one author at a time from the list)
  • A list of the author's publications that have been cited will be displayed.
  • In the left column labeled "Citations", next to each publication, is the number of times the publication has been cited by other publications in the MathSciNet database.
  • To see what the citing publications are:
    • Click on the cited publication's title in the "Publications" column
    • On the record for the publication, near the upper right corner, will be a gray box with "From References" and "From Reviews" links
    • Click on these links to see the citing publications
 

PubMed

Database Description:

  • PubMed - covers bio-medical and life sciences journal articles. Links to citing articles found in the PubMed Central collection of full text journals.

Directions:

  1. Search for an author or article title to be cited.
  2. Click on the check boxes of the relevant items in the search results or leave them unchecked to select all the items on that page.
  3. Select "Cited in PMC" from the Display menu options to see if any full text articles from PubMed Central cite the original sources.

 

 

ScienceDirect

Database Description:

  • ScienceDirect - covers scientific, medical, and technical articles and books.

Directions:

  1. Search for an author or article title to be cited.
  2. Click on a desired item in the search results to view the full record.
  3. Click on "Cited by" in the options in the upper right corner of the record to see if any other articles or books in ScienceDirect cite this one.
 

SciFinder Scholar

Database Description:

  • SciFinder Scholar - covers chemistry and chemistry-related life sciences journal articles and books.

Directions:

  1. Search for an author or article title to be cited.
  2. Select the relevant items from the search results.
  3. Click the "Get Related..." button at the bottom of the screen.
  4. Choose the "Citing References" option to see articles from CAplus and MEDLINE citing the original sources.
 

Scopus Preview: Author Free Lookup

Arizona State University does not subscribe to the Scopus database, however, the publisher of Scopus, Elsevier, does provide some Scopus-generated data for free.   For an author, you are able to see his/her h-index (calculated from 1996 data to the present only), and the number of times this individual was cited in the Scopus database (you cannot see which of the author's articles are being cited, nor which articles are doing the citing). 

Scopus Preview: Author Free Lookup

 

U.S. Patent & Trademark Office Databases

Database Descriptions:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has two patent databases:

  • Issued Patents contains the full text of patents granted from 1976 to the present and can be searched for citation information.
  • Published Applications contains the full text of published applications since March 15, 2001 and does NOT contain citation information. 

Directions for finding citation information in the Issued Patent database:

  1. To determine how many times a U.S. patent has been cited by another U.S. Patent:
    Using the Quick Search:
    • Enter the number of the patent (example: 6404950) in the first search box and change the field from "All Fields" to "Referenced By"

  2. To determine how many times a foreign patent has been cited by a U.S. Patent:
    Using the Quick Search:
    • Enter the foreign patent number in the first search box and change the field from "All Fields" to "Foreign References"
    • Be Aware: The way foreign patents are cited is not consistent - you'll need to search several variations including with and without the country code before the number and with variant spacing and punctuation --- be creative!

  3. To determine how many times a non-patent publication has been cited by a U.S. Patent:
    Using the Quick Search:
    • Enter in the first author's last name in the first search box and change the field from "All fields" to "Other References" 
    • If the author's last name is too common, return to the Quick Search interface and use the second search box to include a word/abbreviation from the journal title (or title of the book or conference); change from "All fields" to "Other References"  (Example: chemical or chem)
 
 

Contact Us

Citation Research Group:
  Lydia LaFaro
  Linda Shackle
  Leslee Shell

Email Us

For information related to your specialty, contact your subject librarian .

 
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