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Using Web of Science for Citation Studies
This is a webpage about using Web of Science (hereafter, WOS) to do citation studies. A citation study involves counting how many times a document (journal paper, conference paper, or whatever) was cited. It can also attempt to identify authors, titles (etc.) of the citing items.
Lehigh's version of WOS covers 1993 to present. The citing items in WOS are either journal articles or some monographic series.
Table of Contents
Using WOS for Citation Studies
Briefly, a citation study involves doing the following three steps. The story is significantly more complicated than this, but below distills the basics. For greater details, see here the tutorial about "Cited Reference Searching" and "Cited Reference Searching for Non-Journal Literature". Also see WOS's own documentation.
First, put in the cited author into the cited author search screen, as below. (Note that all tjree of the citation databases are checkmarked in below. You can select just those that are relevant to your search.)
Second, from the resulting list, select those items that correspond to the cited article, keeping in mind that errors can be present in the way data is rendered by the citing author. For example, is the year correct on the third checked item? Could it even be wrong on the first two checked items? It's not clear. To throw a wide net, all three options are selected below.
Finally, after clicking on the "Finish Search" button toward the top of the previous screen, the following search results come up. These are link to full WOS "source records" for items that cite the original paper, where you can see an abstract and other information about the citing item.
Caveats about doing Citation Studies
CAVEAT #1.
To do a thorough search of WOS (1993 forward) to generate citation counts, read the following notes.
You may notice a discrepancy between the "times cited" in cited reference list and the number of source records that you bring up after clicking the "Finish Search" button. This is because our subscription only enables viewing of source records for 1993 forward. However, you can still see the "times cited" for the entire range of source record coverage, all the way back to 1900 if your paper was cited that far back. You just won't be able to see all the citing records all the way back to 1900.
For example, the items check below are from 1892 (if this is accurate citation data). Note that the "times cited" column has 1 + 10 + 4 =15 records.
However, clicking on the Finish Search button brings up only three records.
CAVEAT #2
If there is a 1972 paper by E. Smith published in Journal XYZ, and this paper was not cited at least once , it will not appear in the cited reference index. This is so even if the paper was cited in the ISI data prior to 1993.
On the other hand, if that 1972 paper was cited at least once by a WOS source record in the period 1993 to present, then it will appear in the cited reference list and you can obtain the items cited count.
The number of WOS source records listed in the items cited count is the number of citing source papers from the entire range of ISI coverage, namely back to 1900, even though our subscription to WOS gives access to 1993 and later records.
In doing cited reference searching, make liberal use of truncation and minimal information (e.g., leave out specific dates and page numbers if possible). That way you'll throw a net wide enough that you will catch variations (including errors) in the way the cited item might have been rendered by citing papers.
Sometimes it is desirable to remove "self-citations". This is so if one wants to count only citing papers authored by individuals none of whom is listed as an author of the cited paper. The paper has to be 1993 or later to use our subscription of Web of Science to remove self-citations. Below is a summary of the steps and then an example.
1. Using the Cited Reference Search, enter the name of the FIRST author of the work (article, book, etc.) and click Search. This is the first author **as it appears on the actual copy of the paper**.
2. From the resulting list of possible matches, checkmark those that either match or are obvious typos, then click Finish Search. This creates SET 1. This is a set of citing papers. Some of the citing papers may have at least one author that matches one of the original paper's authors. (You may wonder why some items are indented with three periods. This is because they happen to be cited references which are also “source records”, that is, have full records in WOS, i.e., they are in our 1993 to later version of WOS as source records.)
3. To remove the self-citations, you can use one of two procedures. First, you can scroll through SET 1 and remove any papers that list one of the authors that appears in the cited paper.
4. Or, you can do this. Using the General Search, put in the names of authors in this format: Author 1 or Author 2 or Author 3 etc. Run the search. This creates SET 2.
5. Next go to the search history area.
6. Combine the Cited Reference Search with the Author name searches using NOT logic: SET 1 not SET 2.
7. The result will be a set of citing articles that do not include any of the original authors. The number of search results is the number of citing papers, excluding self-citations.
Note: there may be some unusual cases where the citing author(s) happen coincidentally to have the same name as one of the authors of the cited paper. To eliminate these, look at the author institutional affiliations (?) and/or email addresses within the WOS source records to see if this helps identify whether it is the same individual or someone different.
EXAMPLE
Let's say you want to determine the number of times that the following paper has been cited in WOS (1993 - forward in our subscription), but excluding from the citation count those citing papers in which any of the authors (Ozdeger E, Sudol ED, ElAasser MS, Klein A) also appears as an author of the citing paper:
Title: Role of the nonionic surfactant Triton X-405 in emulsion polymerization .1. Homopolymerization of styrene
Author(s): Ozdeger E, Sudol ED, ElAasser MS, Klein A
Source: JOURNAL OF POLYMER SCIENCE PART A-POLYMER CHEMISTRY 35 (17): 3813-3825 DEC 1997
1. Run this search in the Cited Ref Search area.
Notice that the item that has been checked, with times cited 29, corresponds to the original paper. If you really want to play it safe, you can check the original paper to see if the other items might be miscites or whether there is actually a paper corresponding to them.
Click on "Finish Search". This becomes "Set #1"
**AT THIS POINT YOU CAN SCROLL THROUGH THE SOURCE RECORDS THAT COME UP AND REMOVE ANY THAT HAVE ONE OF THE AUTHORS.** Or, you can use the following procedure.
3. Go to General Search and run a search on all the authors of the original paper, putting this string into the author search area:
Ozdeger E* OR Sudol E* OR ElAasser M* OR El-Aasser M* OR Klein A*
NOTE: the Asterisk (*) includes all variants of the author's initials. El-Aasser M* includes El-Aasser M and El-Aasser MS. In below screen shot, all of these have been entered but you only see a portion of them:
This results in 1691 items. Now go to the Advanced Search screen and put in "#1 NOT #2", as follows:
This results in 25 citing items that cite the original paper but which exclude the authors in the original paper.
