This document provides guidance on finding citation information using Web of Science. It describes how to use Web of Science to find out how many times an article has been cited to gauge its impact, discover related articles, access citation reports for a subject, and conduct a cited reference search. It explains how to view citation counts, citing articles, journal impact, create citation reports, analyze search results, and search by cited references. The document includes screenshots to demonstrate these functions within the Web of Science interface.

1. Web of Science 2
Finding citation information

2. • This is a guide to finding citation information using Web of
Science.
• For an introductory guide to accessing and using Web of
Science see Web of Science: Finding journal articles and basic
citation information (Web of Science 1).
• For information on creating Journal Citation Reports see Web
of Science: Journal Citation Reports (Web of Science 3).
Web of Science help

3. Web of Science (WoS) provides access to citation information. Use it to:
• Find out how many times a paper has been cited i.e. Gauge its usefulness,
quality or impact.
• Discover which articles have cited an earlier article i.e. Articles which cite an
earlier work will be on a similar or related subject, so may be useful.
• Access citation reports for a subject i.e. Discover which articles have had the
most impact in a subject area (seeguide: Web of Science 3).
• And much more….
This guide explains the range of citation information available and how to
access it including:
Times Cited
Article/Paper Impact
Journal Impact
Citation Reports
Analyze Results
Cited References Search
What it does

4. Enter your search terms in to the search box
Your search results are ordered by
relevance. You can change how the
references are ordered in a number of
ways by clicking on the drop-down menu,
including by times cited. Citations: highest
first will show you which articles have had
the greatest impact for the subject
searched.
The number of times that
a paper has been cited is
indicated here.

5. Click on the number
next to a reference
(in this case 1,824)
to see a list of citing
papers. These are
papers which have
cited (refer to) the
original paper.
You can also create an alert
for the subject searched by
clicking here and registering
with WoS. This alert will tell
you when new items on your
subject are added to WoS.
See a list of citing papers by clicking here

6. This is the number of times this paper
has been cited. Click on the number to
see a list of these citing articles.
Click on the title to display the full record.
Create a citation alert for this paper. You
will then receive an email alert when
someone cites it.
Usage Count is another way of gauging
the usefulness of a paper. It reflects the
number of times the full-text paper has
been accessed via direct link or Open-
URL or by saving the article for use in a
bibliographic management tool. The
Usage Count is a record of all activity
performed by all Web of Science users,
not just users at your institution.
Discover a paper’s impact….

7. When you find a useful paper you
can discover the impact of the
journal that published it (in this
case the journal IEEE Transactions
on Patten Analysis and Machine
Intelligence) by scrolling down to
‘Journal information’. Click on the
journal name for more impact
information.
To learn more about journal impact
see our guide: Web of Science 3:
Journal Citation Reports.
View the impact of a journal

8. Create a Citation Report
for the subject you have
searched (in this case
Human Computer
Interaction). This report will
show which papers have
had the most impact in the
subject you are
researching.
More information on next
slide.
In order to create
a Citation Report
the number of
search results
needs to be less
than 10,000 items
so you may need
to refine your
search.
Create a Citation Report for your subject

9. Citing Articles provides lists of
papers that have cited the
topic searched for.
This report only
includes citations
to items indexed
within WoS, so
does not include
citations to items
not included
within WoS.
Publications
indicates how
many publications
cited the topic in
any given year.
This is the total number of
citations for all of the items
found in the search results.
This graph indicates how
many times the topic has
been cited within the date
range of the search.
More detail is provided here
for each individual paper from
the search results including
citations per year and an
overall average.
A Citation Report provides citation information for
the subject searched

10. For further analysis of search results….
….click on ‘Analyze Results’ to
get a quick overview of your
search results, and discover
trends.
Results analysis enables you to
see your search results in a
visualization. The default display
is by WoS (subject) Categories,
but you can also change the
display to show Publication Years,
Document Types, Authors etc.
More information on
next slide.

11. By choosing Document Types
we can see that most of our
search results are Proceedings
Papers (conference
proceedings), many are [Journal]
Articles, and the rest are other
document types such as Review
Articles, Data Papers etc. This
visualization can also be viewed
as a bar chart.
However you choose to display
your search results in the
visualization (i.e. Document
Types, Publication Years, WoS
Categories etc), it is possible to
refine your search further by
selecting fields from the data
table. Refining will return you to
the new search results.
Example of results analysis by Document Types

12. Select ‘Cited References’
on the home screen and
then add information that
you have such as author,
source or other
bibliographic information
such as volume/issue
number etc. Use the drop-
down menu to ensure that
you are searching in the
correct field….
A Cited References search always starts with a known work and is a way of finding articles
which have cited it. However this search provides different information from a Citation Report
in that it includes items not indexed by WoS and also finds ‘reference variants’ i.e. where an
item or part of an item has been cited incorrectly. Therefore a Cited References search is
important for a comprehensive literature search.
….when you are ready,
click on ‘Search’. More information on next slide.
Another way of searching is by Cited Reference

13. Select the citation(s) that
interest you and click on
‘See Results’….
....you will then see a list of
papers which have cited the
article searched.
These papers will probably be on
similar or related subjects to the
original article searched for in the
Cited References search, so may be
useful.
You can now see a list of references which match your search

14. Need further help?
Your Librarian is:
Vanessa Hill v.hill@mdx.ac.uk
https://libguides.mdx.ac.uk/VanessaHill
VH July 2021