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Measuring and Broadening Your Research Impact: Educational Administration

Set Up a Citation Alert for a Journal Article

To be notified whenever an article of interest is cited, use the "Citation Alert" feature.   This feature is only available for articles that appeared in a journal covered by the Web of Science.

  • Access Web of Science (sign in for off campus use, if necessary)
  • Login to your personal account using the "Sign In" link at the top of the page.
    Citation Alerts require registration (free); to register, click on the "Sign In" link at the top of the page, in the left column, click on the "Register" link and follow instructions.
  • Use the "Search feature" to find the article. 
  • On the results list, click on the item's title to display the full record.
  • In the right-hand column, click on the "Create Citation Alert" button. Alerts are automatically set for one year.
  • To remove an alert, click on the "My Citation Alerts" link at the top of the page; when your alerts are displayed, click on the "Modify Settings" button and mark which articles you wish to remove from your alerts.

To note: Citation Alerts may include references from the Conference Proceedings section of Web of Science; NMSU does not subscribe to this component and therefore you will be unable to view these records.

Caution

Please be aware that changes are being made to the functionality of Web of Science which affect citation reports.  If you have questions or concerns, please contact Alisa Gonzalez at acgonzal@nmsu.edu.

Introduction

The Web of Science database offered by the NMSU Library contains Social Sciences Citation Index (1956-present) and Science Citation Index Expanded (1900-present) in its core collection. Other major databases included in our subscription are: Biological Abstracts (1926-present), MEDLINE (1950-present), and Zoological Record (1864-present). Some institutions also have the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, but NMSU's subscription does not include that component at this point.

 

Web of Science is the original citation research tool and, along with Google Scholar, it is the most interdisciplinary. WoS and most comprehensive citation resource available to the NMSU community Although it is comprehensive, WoS is not a reliable tool for all disciplines.  Its strength lies in the STEM fields.

 

To Note:

  • Only citations from their source journals are counted.
  • Citations from books, dissertation & theses, patents and technical reports are not included in the database; therefore disciplines that publish heavily in the journal literature are better covered than those that don't. 
  • Subjects are not covered evenly by date; the science journals used for the source of citation data go much farther back in time than the source journals in the engineering and the social sciences.
  • Some subject areas are poorly covered including business and education.
  • NMSU's subscription does not include the arts and humanities.

Get a Citation Analysis Report for an Author

The Citation Report feature displays:

  • Overall Total of the Times Cited
  • Average Citations Per Item
  • H-index
  • Bar chart for the number of items published each year
  • Bar chart for the number of citations each year
  • Total Citations for each article
  • Number of citations each year for each article

To note: The Citation Report only analyzes the correct citations to the author's journal articles from the journals covered in the Web of Science; variant citations are not covered, nor can an analysis be done on an author's books, conference papers, patents, other non-journal documents or from journals not covered by the Web of Science.

  •  Access Web of Science (sign in for off campus use, if necessary)
  •  Use the "Search" feature to find all the articles by an author.
    Recommended search: Use the author name with first initial, then add "OR author's name with first and middle initials". Example: smith j  or smith jm
  •  On the results page, click on the "Create Citation Report" link at the top upper right of the list.

Searching Tips

In general:

**To find the citation count, use the "Cited Reference" search so that variant forms of citation can be found; the citation count listed in the regular search portion of the database does not include the variant citation data and you may be undercounting by using this number. 

**If possible, avoid using all 3 fields in the "Cited Reference" search form as this may limit results to just the correct citation. Variant citations need to be found so that a more accurate assessment of citation can be made.

   The less put in the search form, the more likely variant-citations will be found.

**Use truncation liberally in the "Cited Reference" search form to capture mistakes/variants by citing authors.

Examples:

  • Einst*n, A* (in place of Einstein, A* as the cited author)
  • J* (in place of J Appl Phys or Journal of Applied Physics as the cited work)

**Secondary authors are not always traced in the "Cited Reference Search"; therefore, when doing a citation search for a publication, search by its first author.

** If it takes more than one search to find all the publications for which you would like to Analyze Results or do a Citation Report, you can combine your individual result sets together to form one large set of results by using the the “Advanced Search” feature ("OR" the set numbers together). By putting all the results into one set, the Analyze Results or Citation Reports features will be more accurate. 


   Example: #1 OR #2 OR #3 

For prolific authors or authors with common names:

**Use the author name with first initial, then add "OR plus the author's name with first and middle initials".                         Example: smith j or smith j m

**Combine the author with a date or range of dates.  If using the "Cited Reference" search form, be sure to include likely typo errors in the date.    Example: 1998 or 1993 or 1989

**Combine the author with the Publication Name.  If using the "Cited Reference" search form, be sure to include likely variations such as abbreviations, acronyms and known misspellings in the cited work field. 

For example, if the cited work is Journal of Solid State Chem, put “ J Sol* OR Sol* OR JSSC”. This would retrieve Journal of Solid State Chemistry (the correct journal name), Solid State Chemistry (an incorrect journal name in which the “Journal of” was dropped – a common occurrence), and the acronym if this is in common usage.

Tutorials on using the Web of Science are available at the publisher's site.