What Are Citation Indexes?Citation indexes track references that authors put in the bibliographies of published papers. They provide a way to search for and analyze the literature in a way not possible through simple keyword/topical searching. It also enables users to gather data on the "impact" of journals, as well as assessing particular areas of research activity and publication. This field is called bibliometrics.UT-Austin users can access the Web of Science citation indexes back to 1965, plus the conference proceedings citation index back to 1990.
What Can I Do with Citation Indexes?
- Find papers that cite earlier papers.
- Citation indexing is a way to look forward in the literature from the starting point of a particular paper or group of papers. This is a complementary approach to ordinary word-based literature searching. It allows you to find more documents on the same or similar topic without using any keywords or subject terms.
- Find out how many times my papers have been cited. Determine my h-index.
- Determine which are the "best" journals in my field.
- Verify old and obscure references.
- Sometimes you'll run across a mysterious reference, and you won't be able to determine what it's referring to. By searching that reference as a "cited reference" in Web of Science, you may find other, more complete citations that might solve the mystery. It doesn't matter how old the mystery item is -- if someone has cited it it will show up in the Citation Index.
Further Reading
