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Research Impacts Using Citation Metrics


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Web of Science Cited Reference Search

This is the traditional, highly respected citation research source that uses the Web of Science database (from Thomson Reuters and part of the Web of Knowledge) to search the citation references of scholarly articles in over 10,000 of the highest impact, well-regarded journals worldwide, including Open Access journals and over 110,000 conference proceedings. Web of Science contains authoritative, scholarly multidisciplinary content in the Sciences (1900+), Social/ Behavioral Science (1900+), and Arts & Humanities (1956+).

Cited Reference Search can be used to:

  • Tally the citation count for an article, paper, book or even work of art.
  • Find variant forms of a citation that might not be retrieved in a regular database search.
  • List the journal articles that cite the item.
  • Eliminate self-citations
  • Create a Citation Map


Cited Reference Search is a forward search, which finds articles that cite the article being searched. Thus results will consist of articles with later publication dates.

How to Perform a Cited Reference Search:

Web of Science Cited Ref. Search

 Go to Web of Science Cited Reference Search.

Enter information about the article(s) you wish to citation track.

Cited Author field

Be especially careful with author names.

Use only the first initial with an asterisk to include citations with either the initial or full first name.

List alternative spellings of last names separated by an "OR".

Cited Work field

This is for the name of the journal an article is in. Click on Journal Abbreviation List to find the correct abbreviation.

Use the other fields as needed (such as Cited Title), but try to keep the information broad enough to include possible name variants and citing errors.

Cited Reference Search Results

To more completely identify the article(s) you're interested in, click on Show Expanded Titles in the heading bar. Look at the results carefully. (To switch back, click on Show Abbreviated Titles.) As shown in the example below, look for and select all variants of the article you're looking for. In this case, one of the entries has an incorrect volume number.

WoS Citation Reference Search Results

Click Finish Search to view a list of citing articles. The number of citing articles may vary from the number on the results page. This is due to some of the citing articles being in Web of Knowledge databases that are not part of the UCI Web of Science subscription.

To access more information, go back to the results page, and click on the blue View Record link in the abbreviated view, or the blue title link in the expanded view, of the original cited work (the 2nd example above).  This takes one to the Article's Full Record. In the right blue panel is information about citing articles, related records and related records.
Web of Science Article Record

Cited Article Full Record

Clicking on view all citing articles in the right blue panel, will provide database location information for articles available in the Web of Knowledge, and if part of the UCI subscription, clicking on the count number will link to the article records.

Cited References are the articles cited in the original paper.

Thus by following both citing articles and cited references, it's possible to go backwards and forwards tracking citations from paper to paper through time.