Sunday 16 March 2014

Electronic citation searching

Online citation searching is a powerful tool for the researcher. It allows easy searching of records that have been cited in 

the selected document as well as those which have later cited that document. The Web of Knowledge Citation Indexes have 

the facility for citation searches (using the Cited Reference Search option) using a combination of all or some of three fields: 
•  Cited author 
•  Cited work (that is, journal or book title, patent number, or another work) 
•  Cited year (the year the cited work was published; most effective when used 
in conjunction with the other search options) 
For example, a search on WoK cited reference search using the author name Cartwright, M. and the year the cited work 

was published set as 1999 and 2000 results in seven hits, one of which has a link to a record stored on the WoK database. 

The article reference is: 
Cartwright,  M.  and  Shepperd,  M.  (2000)  An  empirical  investigation of an object-oriented software system, IEEE 

Transactions on Software Engineering, August, 26(8): 786-96. 

Clicking on the link to this article then gives two figures in the full record: 

•  Cited references: 19 
•  Times cited: 21 

'Cited references' indicates the number of references that Cartwright and 
Sheppard included in their article. 'Times cited' indicates the number of subse-
quent articles that have cited Cartwright and Sheppard's article. Of the 19 cited 
references, eight of them have records on WoK and therefore links to those 
records. All 21 of the 'times cited' records have links. The cited references date 
from 1988 to 1998 and the 'times cited' records from May 2002 to November 
2006 (as at January 2007), demonstrating the backward and forward looking 
nature of citation searching. See Figure 7.2 for a diagrammatic representation 
of the timeline. 
When checking out this same article on Scopus, the result shows that it has 
been cited 30 times in Scopus between 2001 and November 2006. 
From this point, the cited references and 'times cited' information on any 
of the linked documents can be viewed. A chain of related records can then 
be  retrieved,  by  continuing  to  view  references  in  each  subsequent  docu-
ment, but beware becoming lost and moving into irrelevant territory along 
the way. 
Exactly what is retrieved using an online citation search depends on the 
database and the subscription. It may be possible to retrieve the full text (as on 
Science Direct), a citation with abstract or the basic citation of the document. 
If an item is linked using CrossRef or by their institution using other linking 
techniques, the searcher may be able to access the full text of the item (see 
Chapter 10). 
Using an electronic citation search allows a search for any of the authors of a work, not only the first author. 
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