[Private] SBM Research Postgraduates (RPG) Guide: Use of Bibliometrics

Use of Bibliometrics

During your research process, you may need to gauge the importance of a publication by counting the number of times it has been cited by other scholars. Counting the citation gives you information about the article's impact on its discipline. If an article has a high number of citations, you may conclude that it has been the subject of discussion in its discipline. In addition, finding the list of articles that have cited an article can help you identify more related information about your topic, a process called "citation chasing."

*** It is important to remember that measuring the quality of a publication, is a fairly subjective process. Results can vary depending on different factors, thus a single factor is not sufficient for evaluating an author's work.

As we have mentioned in previous sections, citation tools such as Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus can be used for citation analysis. However, these tools have their own limitations and coverage, and they should be used with caution in research evaluation.

The following examples will show you how to find citation numbers on Web of Science.

Citation Count of a Known Title

How to find the citation counts for "A survey of corporate governance", written by Shleifer, A., and Vishny, RW.?

1. Go to Web of Science
2. On the default search page, enter the "Article Title" (i.e. "A survey of corporate governance"), and select Title from the pull-down menu.
3. Run the search.
    
4. The Times Cited number should indicate how many articles indexed in WOS are citing this paper. Perform a Cited Reference Search to include citations to items not indexed within Web of Science (see Cited Reference Search).
5. Click the Times Cited link will show the information of all 1,500 articles.
   
   (Important Notes: WOS does not count citation every journal article published around the world, and access to these records is limited to institution's subscription.)

Topic Search & Analyze Results

Topics Search

In addition to journal-title search, you can perform a search for a specific topic. Enter your search terms in any order. The product returns every record containing all your search terms.

1. Enter your search terms for the topic on WOS. To look for an exact phrase, use quotation marks "...", e.g. Example: "corporate governance" and "stock price". Use Boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT) if necessary.
2. Results are sorted by Publication Date by default. Change the sorting from the pull-down menu to fit your needs. You can also refine the results by various options listed on the left-hand column (e.g. Document Types, Research Areas, etc)
3. Click on the article title to display the full record.
4. In addition, Analyze Result allows users to group and rank records in a result set by extracting data values from a variety of fields
5. To locate full-text of a particular article, use View Text from Publishers or Find@HKUST. 

WOS Online Tutorials

• Web of Science Search Tips
• Cited Reference Searching
• Citation Map
• Citation Alert

If you need any further assistance on WOS, contact our reference librarian (lbref@ust.hk).