Scholarly Communication

Citation tracking is one way to assess the impact of articles in scholarly journals. An article is assessed by counting the number of times other authors mention it in their work. Researchers do citation tracking for several reasons:

• document article impact by showing which other authors have cited the article 
• for inclusion in the tenure and promotion dossier
• for inclusion in the yearly merit report
• demonstrate broad reach - international citations - cross-discipline citations
• Peer reviewers of your work
• discover possible collaborators - others doing similar work
• Self-esteem - it feels really good!

LIMITATIONS:

• Citation counts are not a measure of quality, as articles may be cited for both negative and positive reasons.
• Citation behavior varies by discipline. Raw citation counts cannot be used to compare authors in different subject areas, even for those subjects that may seem closely related.
• No index will cover all publications and formats and only counts what's in its own database.. Each database indexes different content & disciplines with some overlap. 
• One resource may perform much better for one researcher than another
• Not all published articles may be included

There is no single citation analysis tool that will find all citations. The most comprehensive citation searching resources are:

• Scopus (OU database) - heavily sciences less  - View Scopus searching Guide
• Web of Science - (OU database) - social sciences, art & humanities - View WOS citation report guide
• Google Scholar - all fields, includes books and conference presentations - View Google Scholar citation searching guide (University of Illinois Library)
• Discipline databases JSTOR, CINAHL ect. - View citation searching for the Humanities (Wichita State U Libraries)

**Always state citations count based on tool use > As according to:.... 

What is the h-index?

The h-index measures the impact of a particular researcher rather than a journal. It takes into account the number of papers published and the number of citations received by these papers, resulting in a single number rating.

Limitations of h-index

• Only calculates the h-index of an author based on the scholarly articles included in that database, so h-scores will be different per tool
• Scholars further along in their careers will likely have more publications then those just starting their careers. 
• It does not include books
• H-index can not be compared across disciplines. Different disciplines have different publishing and citation environments. 

*For more on citation analysis and h-index see the UIC Libraries guide.