Citation searching is the process of going both backward and forward in time to learn about the works that influenced an author (by looking at who they cited) and who the author themselves influenced (by looking at who cited them).
Web of Science is still recognized as the first place to go when you are looking for citation information for most scientific disciplines. The CSU Libraries provides access to the Web of Science Database. Once in the database you can perform citation searching and create citation reports. Consult the Web of Science guide for more information.
The Web of Science Citation Reports feature provides a bar chart, times cited information, and more.
When you search Web of Science each article in the results list will have "times cited" information. Click on the blue number next to times cited to see a list of the journal articles which cite the original article.
In this example below, the "The importance of temporal resolution in food web analysis..." article has been cited 93 times.
Google Scholar also provides citation information. The cited numbers may be duplicates of what is provided in Web of Science. Google Scholar also includes some book chapters, conference proceedings, and other documents which aren't included in Web of Science.
(Google Scholar sometimes duplicates citations leading to inaccurate numbers. It is still a good way to find similar articles and to get a general idea of citation numbers, especially for items not in Web of Science.)
Using the Google Scholar advanced search form, and searching for the same article provides this:
The cited by numbers are the same as in Web of Science. Usually the cited numbers from Web of Science and Google Scholar are different.
The following Eigenfactor Score information is quoted from the JCR page.
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The Eigenfactor Score also considers which journals have contributed citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more than lesser cited journals.
What is impact factor?
Impact factor (IF) is a measure of a journal's impact, based on the number of times articles have been cited against the number of articles published. Journals with higher impact factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones.
The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database is used to find impact factors and more for journals. JCR lets you view a group of journals by subject category or search a specific journal.
Journal information includes: total cites, impact factor, 5-year impact factor, and more.