Getting the Most Out of Web of Science

The Citation Report feature provides opportunities for advanced citation tracing by analyzing Citing Articles and Times Cited.

To get a citation report, click on Citation Report on the right of the search box. If the number of articles is above 10,000, the Citation Report button will not be available.

On the Citation Report page, you can do several things (see image below):

1. Analyze Results of your original search.

2. Change the years of the Publications included in the report.

3. View the Citing Articles, which shows the total number of articles that have cited one or more of the items in the citation report.

4. Analyze the sets of citing articles.

5. View Times Cited, which shows the total number of times items in the results set were cited.

6. See the H-index of the articles in your results.

A bar chart is also displayed showing the publication dates of the items in the results, and the publication dates of the articles citing the items in your results.

Below the bar graph is a table listing all of the items in the results set and how many times each item has been cited. This feature is useful when doing complex citation tracing within a field of knowledge.

The items in the results list can be sorted in different ways by using the drop-down menu to the right of the number of publications in the table. Sorting options include Date, Citations, and Usage.

The example below shows the results for the search filament* AND gala* ordered by Citations: highest first. This search retrieved 4,772 publications. Each publication is shown in the table along with the number of citations it received year by year, and its number of citations in total. The Times Cited total equals the sum of the total column seen in this table. In this example, the Times Cited total of all the publications in this result list is 195,781.

Take note that Citation Reports in Web of Science only reflect the articles indexed in Web of Science.

However, Cited Reference Searching displays all citing articles, even if they have  not been indexed in Web of Science.

What this means for you, is that you should run a Cited Reference Search along with your Citation Reports, to make sure you are finding all relevant statistics.