Bibliometrics and Altmetrics: Measuring the Impact of Knowledge

Certain disciplines, journals, and document types may not be well represented in the more traditional sources for citation analysis, such as Web of Science.  In this situation, it becomes necessary to find alternative sources for locating citations to an author or published work.  This page identifies potential alternative sources grouped by their database search interface since each of the sources within a group would have a common search strategy for extracting citation information. 

Click on any option below to go to the information for that source:

• ACM Digital Library
• Amazon.com
• Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service
• BioMed Central
• EBSCOhost Databases (including America: History and Life, CINAHL, Communication and Mass Media Complete, Historical Abstracts, LBGT Life, Library Information Science & Technology Abstracts, PsycINFO, PsycArticles)
• Espacenet Worldwide Patent Database
• Full-Text Journal Collections (including HighWire Press, JSTOR, Project Muse, SpringerLink, Wiley InterScience)
• IEEE Xplore
• inSPIRE
• MathSciNet
• PLOS Journals
• ProQuest Databases (including BioOne Abstracts and Indexes, ProQuest Technology Collection, EconLit, Social Services Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts)
• PubMed
• Sage Journals Online
• ScienceDirect
• SciFinder Scholar
• Scitation
• U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Databases

Adapted from Citation Analysis Guide, University of Michigan Library. Authors: Paul Grochowski, Barbara Shipman, Deirdre Spencer, and Sue Wortman. [Accessed June, 2014]. 

Database Description: ACM Digital Library - covers computing literature from the Association of Computing Machinery and many other publishers.  Includes books, journal articles, conference proceedings, doctoral dissertations, master's theses, and technical reports.   Directions: Search for an author or title to be cited (e.g. Dorothea Wagner). Be sure "expanded form" has been selected for the "Display results" option. The citation count will be listed in the Bibliometrics section of each search result entry.

» Back to Top

Database Description: Some of the books in Amazon.com show which other books have cited that book. (Be aware of the limuitations of Amazon.com Citations). Directions: To search a particular book, set the category on the left of the search box to Books and then search for the book using the bibliographic information you have about the book. Example: Click on the title of the book:  Woody, B. (1992). Black women in the workplace: Impacts of structural change in the economy. New York: Greenwood Press. Look toward the bottom of the listing for the Citations section (after the Customer Reviews section).

» Back to Top

Database Description: Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service - a digital library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics. It is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory under a NASA grant. Directions: When you run a search, entries that have been cited by others will list how many have cited this entry and will provide a link to those entries.

» Back to Top

Database Description:

Biomed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher of peer–reviewed open access journals. The portfolio of journals spans all areas of biology, biomedicine and medicine, and includes broad interest titles, such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine alongside specialist journals, such as Retro virology and BMC Genomics. All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely accessible online immediately upon publication..

Directions:

          1. Use the Advanced Search to search the References field (select "References" from the drop down menus).

          2. Articles are also marked in red as Highly Accessed if they are accessed more frequently than would be expected but there is no indication of what benchmarks are used to make this designation.

         3. On the home page there are also links for Most Viewed and Most Forwarded articles.

» Back to Top

Database Descriptions:

• Academic Search Complete - multi-disciplinary database providing information for nearly every area of academic study.
• America: History and Life - covers articles, book chapters, and books on the history and culture of the United States and Canada. 
• Business Source Complete - covers full text journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics.
• CINAHL -  covers journal articles in nursing and allied health.
• Historical Abstracts - covers articles, book chapters, and books on the history of the world (excluding the U.S. and Canada) from 1450 to the present.
• LGBT Life - covers social, legal, economic, political, cultural, historical, literary, & health concerns of the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender community.
• Library & Information Science Source - covers librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more.
• PsycARTICLES - full text articles from 60 journals published by the American Psychological Association and other allied organizations.
• PsycINFO - covers psychology articles, book chapters, and occasionally books. 

Directions:

         1.  Click on "Cited References" in the navigation bar across the top.

          2. Search for the author or article title to be cited.

         3. Click on the Cited References link.

          4. To view records related to the article shown above, mark checkboxes and click Related Records.

» Back to Top

Database Description:

Espacenet - a worldwide patent database developed and maintained by the European Patent Office containing patent information for over 80 countries and patenting agencies.  This is not a complete database of all the world's patents and while some of the patents databases are available in full text, others only have bibliographic information plus an abstract.

Directions:

To see if a patent has been cited by other patents:

1. Go to Espacenet. 
2. In the left column, click on number search.
3. Keep the database selection set to "Worldwide."
4. Put the patent number in the patent number box (if necessary, include the two letter country code immediately before the number if too many results are retrieved from a plain number search).
5. On the results list, click on the title of the patent to display the bibliographic data screen.
6. On the bibliographic data screen, click on "View list of citing documents."

» Back to Top

Database Descriptions:

• HighWire Press - hosts almost 1200 journals from over 140 scholarly publishers with emphasis on the life sciences.
• JSTOR - covers past years of scholarly journals in all disciplines, cutting off at volumes published one to five years ago.
• Project Muse - covers approximately 400 humanities and social sciences journals representing over 60 scholarly publishers.
• SpringerLink - covers over 1900 full text scholarly journals published by Springer.
• Wiley InterScience - covers 1400 full text scholarly journals published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Directions:

These full-text journal collections do not provide a special search option for finding citing articles or show links to citing articles.  But since the full text of the articles also includes the references, it is possible to search for citations using basic keyword searching methods. 

Be Aware: Each of these collections has a somewhat different search mechanism, so the directions given here have been written in general terms that then must be applied to the specific search entry requirements of a given collection. 

1. 1. Search the full text articles, including the references, for the author last name and the article title to be cited using the advanced search option if available.
   2. If necessary, enclose the title words in quotations to force searching as a phrase.
   3. Do not limit the search to the author or title fields.
   4. Take advantage of any search functions that allow you to limit to document type or other feature that would help exclude non-relevant material.
   5. Scan the results for citing references from other authors ignoring hits on the original article and self citations.

» Back to Top

Database Description: IEEE Xplore contains almost 2 million articles and papers from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineer's (IEEE) journals and conference proceedings. The subject of "Electrical Engineering" is broadly defined here and articles may be found from all areas of engineering in which electronics may be applied. IEEE Xplore's citation information only covers what other IEEE publications are citing each other.  Directions: Find the article of interest (search by author, title, etc.), Look below the Publication Year information for a line that says Cited By and gives a number. Citations listed here are IEEE journal articles or conference papers that cite this item. Note that you can also search by author in the Advanced Search and then sort by Most Cited.

» Back to Top

Database Description:

MathSciNet indexes the mathematical literature and has a special search features called "Author Citations". "The Citation Database is based on the information contained in reference lists drawn from certain journals covered by MathSciNet. Reference lists in all of the journals covered in the Citation Database go back to a publication year of 2000. A smaller number of journals have reference lists in MathSciNet back to 1997."  

Directions:

• Click on the "Citations" tab at the top of the search box.
• Enter either the author's "lastname" or "lastname, firstinitial" in the search box.
• If more than one author matches the search, click on the scroll arrow in the box and select the appropriate author (you will only be able to select one author at a time from the list).
• A list of the author's publications that have been cited will be displayed.
• In the left column labeled "Citations", next to each publication, is the number of times the publication has been cited by other publications in the MathSciNet database.
• To see what the citing publications are:
  • Click on the cited publication's title in the "Publications" column.
  • On the record for the publication, near the upper right corner, will be a gray box with "From References" and "From Reviews" links.
  • Click on these links to see the citing publications.

» Back to Top

Database Description: Public Library of Science (PLOS) publishes seven peer-reviewed open access science journals. Subject coverage include biology, medicine, genetics, pathogens, biology, tropical diseases.  Directions: Article-Level Metrics tool allows researchers to determine the importance, or impact, of each article. All articles show the metrics for the article including number of views, whether the article has been cited, whether the article has been bookmarked, and whether any blogs have discussed the article. In an Advanced Search you can search the References field to find articles that have cited a particular author.

» Back to Top

Database Descriptions: BioOne Abstracts and Indexes - covers biological, ecological, and environmental science journals. Cited references begin in 1998. ProQuest SciTech Collection - covers many subject disciplines including materials, engineering, aerospace, high-technology. EconLit - covers economic development, history, macroeconomics, microeconomics. Cited references vary by journal title. Social Services Abstracts - covers social work and human services articles. Cited references begin in 2004. Directions: Search for the author or article title to be cited. Look for items in the search results that have "Cited by" at the bottom of the entry, indicating they have been cited by other articles in the ProQuest databases. Click on the "Cited by" link to see the articles from the ProQuest databases within the same disciplinary group (Social Sciences, Engineering and Materials, Natural Sciences, or APA Psyc... databases) that are citing the original source.

» Back to Top

Database Description:

PubMed - covers bio-medical and life sciences journal articles. Links to citing articles found in the PubMed Central collection of full text journals.

Directions:

1. In PubMed, use the dropdown menu (set by default to All Databases) and select PMC.
2. Click on Search, without entering any term.
3. Go to Advanced.
4. In the pulldown menu under "Builder" select Reference Author. You may also add other terms in different fields in a second box. You may also click on Show index list when you have chosen a name in Reference Author and you will see a list of authors with the name you are searching. Select one or more and the search engine will place the names in the search box and search those names.
5. Click on Search.
6. The results showing are those articles in the PubMed Central Collection in which the "Reference Author" was cited.

» Back to Top

Database Description: Sage Journals Online - full text journals published by Sage, most going back to volume 1 issue 1 for the title. Covers communication studies, criminology, education, health sciences, management & organization studies, materials science, political science, psychology, sociology and urban studies & planning. Directions: Use the dropdown menu on Advanced Search screen to change the search field to References. If accessing the journals from off-campus, use the Reload Button to access full text (if  UMD Libraries have a subscription).

 » Back to Top

Database Description: ScienceDirect - covers scientific, medical, and technical articles and books. Directions: Search for an author or article title to be cited. Click on a desired item in the search results to view the full record. Click on Citing Articles on the right side.

 » Back to Top

Database Description: SciFinder - covers chemistry and chemistry-related life sciences journal articles and books. Directions: Search for an author or article title to be cited. Select the relevant items from the search results. Click the "Get Related..." button at the top of the screen. Choose the "Get Citing" option to see articles from CAplus and MEDLINE citing the original source.

» Back to Top

Database Description: Scitation - search recent volumes of scholarly journals in physics and engineering published by the American Institute of Physics. Directions: Choose the Advanced Search. Run a search for an article title or an author within the corresponding search boxes: "With this title" and/or "With this author." Click on an entry from the results listing. Click on "Cited by" tab under the journal record.

» Back to Top

Database Descriptions:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has two patent databases:

• Issued Patents contains the full text of patents granted from 1976 to the present and can be searched for citation information.
• Published Applications contains the full text of published applications since March 15, 2001 and does NOT contain citation information. 

Directions for finding citation information in the Issued Patent database:

1. To determine how many times a U.S. patent has been cited by another U.S. Patent:
   Using the Quick Search:
   • Enter the number of the patent (example: 6404950) in the first search box and change the field from "All Fields" to "Referenced By"
      
2. To determine how many times a foreign patent has been cited by a U.S. Patent: 
   Using the Quick Search:
   • Enter the foreign patent number in the first search box and change the field from "All Fields" to "Foreign References"
   • Be Aware: The way foreign patents are cited is not consistent - you'll need to search several variations including with and without the country code before the number and with variant spacing and punctuation --- be creative!
      
3. To determine how many times a non-patent publication has been cited by a U.S. Patent: 
   Using the Quick Search:
   • Enter in the first author's last name in the first search box and change the field from "All fields" to "Other References" 
   • If the author's last name is too common, return to the Quick Search interface and use the second search box to include a word/abbreviation from the journal title (or title of the book or conference); change from "All fields" to "Other References"  (Example: chemical or chem)

» Back to Top