Citation Indexes:Finding the best journals and articles with

Web of Science

http://unihub.mdx.ac.uk/your-study/library-and-it-support

Citation indexes enable you to...• Find which articles have cited an earlier article e.g. if you have

found an excellent article, you can see which articles have subsequently cited it.

• Find articles on a similar or related subject i.e. If an article has cited another article, then they are probably on a similar/related subject.

• Find out how many times a paper has been cited i.e. gauge the usefulness/quality of a paper.

• Find the best journals in your field (Journal Citation Reports) i.e. citation data is used to rank journals, so are a useful way of seeing how journals perform in relation to others in the same subject area.

MDX subscribes to Web of Science and Scopus which can be used to find citation information. This

guide concentrates on Web of Science.

Web of Science (WoS)……• Access to the world’s leading scholarly literature in the sciences, social sciences,

arts, and humanities and proceedings of international conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions

• Web of Science includes:• Science Citation Index Expanded (1970-present) • Social Sciences Citation Index (1970-present) • Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1975-present) • Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Science (1990-present) • Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Social Science & Humanities

(1990-present) • You can:

• Create a visual representation of citation relationships with ‘Citation Mapping’

• Capture citation activity and trends graphically with ‘Citation Report’• Use the ‘Analyze Tool’ to identify trends and patterns

• Web of Science is part of Web of Knowledge which includes Journal Citation Reports (more later).

Accessing WoS (students)MyUniHub > MyStudy > MyLibrary > Databases > W > Web of Science

Accessing WoS (staff)MyUniHub > MyUniversity > MyLibrary > Databases > W > Web of Science

Databases > W > Web of Science

Enter your search terms into the search box…

You can refine your search by date.

The default search is by ‘Topic’ but it is possible to search for a specific author, publication name or publication year etc. Use the drop-down menu to choose and then click on ‘Search’.

Your search results are displayedClick on the article title for more detail plus article impact information (more info later).

Refine search results by document type, author, date etc.

Create a citation report for the subject you have searched i.e. which articles have had the most impact in the subject you are researching (more info on next 2 slides). It is also possible to analyse your search results using the Analyze Results function (more info later).

Create a Citation Report

Click on ‘Create a Citation Report’ to find out which articles have had the most impact in the subject you have searched for……

….the Citation Report is displayed

This is the subject we originally searched i.e. Human computer interaction.

The references are listed here….

You can change how the references are ordered using the drop-down menu. ‘Times cited- highest to lowest’ will tell you which article has had the greatest impact in this subject area.The references are listed on

the left, and citation statistics on the right.

To get further analysis of your search results click on Analyze Results

Use the menu to analyse your search results e.g. the most cited authors for the subject searched for (in this case “Human Computer Interaction”).

To find an article’s impact….

….you can then see how many times the article has been cited by other authors. Click on the link to see a list of these citing articles.

….click on an article title in your search results….

More info on next slide >>>>>

Article impact continued….You can also create a Citation Map. Click on ‘View Citation map’.

Citation maps provide details of what has been cited by the original article, and which articles have cited it subsequently

More info on next slide >>>>>

Other things you can do….Create a Citation Alert for an article and receive an email when someone cites this article.

Usage counts

‘Usage Count’ is another way of gauging the usefulness of an article. It reflects the number of times the full-text article has been accessed via direct link or Open-URL or by saving the article for use in a bibliographic management tool. The Usage Count is a record of all activity performed by all Web of Science users, not just users at your institution.

You can also view the impact of a journal

When you have found an article, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on ‘Journal Citation Report’.

**** Web of Science is not full text ****However click on ‘WebBridge’ to see if you can access the full text through other resources that we subscribe to.

If the article is available from another resource, ‘WebBridge’ will take you to the full text.

If not, then you will see this page which includes a link to our Inter Library Loan service. Use this to request a copy of the article from the British library.

Another way of searching is by Cited Reference

For example to find which articles have cited a specific article, enter the article title, select ‘Cited title’ from the drop-down menu and click on ‘Search’……

…...you will then see a list of journals

These are the journals that contain articles which have cited the original article (in this case ‘Detecting faces in images’)……

…..select the journals that interest you and click on ‘Finish Searching’…….

……you will now see a list of articles from the journals you selected. All the journal articles in this list have cited the original article.

It is possible to create a Journal Citation Report for a subject area

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) are:

• Systematic, objective means to critically evaluate the world’s leading journals

• Quantitative tools for ranking, evaluating, categorizing and comparing journals

• Published by Thomson Reuters using data collected by Web of Science• Divided into 2 fields: Science (7,200 + titles) and Social Sciences (2,100+ titles)

• Demonstrate most frequently cited journal in a field & highest impact journal

• Data published annually for previous year

• JCR distils citation trend data for 10,000+ journals from 25 million+ cited references indexed by Thomson Reuters every year.

Creating a Journal Citation ReportClick on ‘Journal Citation Reports’ on the home screen (continued on next slide).

Select ‘Journals by Rank’........then click on ‘Select categories’. Scroll through the list and choose the category (subject) you are interested in e.g. Cybernetics....

....select the year required, and either the Science (SCIE) or Social Sciences (SSCI) edition (or both). Then click on ‘Submit’. Continued on next slide.

You can now see a list of journalsThe report shows which journals have had the most impact in a given subject area based on data collected by Web of Science. This example shows influential journals for the subject of ‘Cybernetics’.

Some impact statistics are displayed here. More information later.

To find out more impact information about individual journals....

....click on a journal title.

You can now see historic data and additional measures of impact (see next slides for more information).

Ways of measuring impact• Total cites

• Impact factor

• 5 year impact factor

• Immediacy Index

• Articles

• Cited half-life

• Eigenfactor Score

• Article Influence Score

More info on next slides >>>>>

Total cites: Total number of citations to the journal in a year.

Impact Factor: Average number of times that articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in a year.

Calculated by dividing the number of citations in the year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years.

The citing articles may be articles published in the same journal. However, most citing works are from different journals, proceedings, or books indexed by Web of Science.

Ways of measuring impact continued…

5 year impact factor: average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in a year. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in a year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years.

Immediacy Index: average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published and indicates how quickly articles in a journal are cited.

Calculated by dividing the number of citations to articles published in a given year by the number of articles published in that year. Useful for comparing journals specializing in cutting-edge research.

Ways of measuring impact continued…

Articles: total number of articles in the journal in a year.

(Journal) Cited half-life: the median age of the articles that were cited by other journals during the JCR year. Half of a journal's cited articles were published more recently than the cited half-life.

For example, in JCR 2003, the journal Food Biotechnology has a citing half-life of 9.0. That means that 50% of all articles cited by articles in Food Biotechnology in 2003 were published between 1995 and 2003 (inclusive).

Only journals that publish 100 or more cited references have a citing half-life. A higher or lower cited half-life does not imply any particular value for a journal, but figures may be useful to assist in collection management.

Ways of measuring impact continued…

Eigenfactor Score: calculation is based on the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the year, but it also considers which journals have contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more than lesser cited journals. 

References from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal are removed, so that Eigenfactor Scores are not influenced by journal self-citation.

Ways of measuring impact continued…

Article Influence Score: determines the average influence of a journal's articles over the first five years after publication. 

It is calculated by dividing a journal’s Eigenfactor Score by the number of articles in the journal, so that it is a ratio of a journal’s citation influence to the size of the journal’s article contribution over a period of five years.

The mean Article Influence Score is 1.00. A score greater than 1.00 indicates that each article in the journal has above-average influence. A score less than 1.00 indicates that each article in the journal has below-average influence.

Ways of measuring impact continued…

Need further help?

Contact your Librarian: http://libguides.mdx.ac.uk/liaisonlibrarians

Make an appointment: http://bit.ly/MakeAnAppointmentLibrarians

VH Nov 2016