Citation Analysis: Interpreting the Results
At the University of Tennessee (Knoxville campus), the citation indexes created by the Institute for Scientific
Information -- the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the Science Citation Index (expanded), and the Social Sciences
Citation Index -- can be searched on the web using the Web of Science. They provide access to journal articles,
review articles, reviews, meeting abstracts, etc. found in several thousand journals in the humanities,
social sciences, and sciences. They also provide unique access to the cited reference lists of these source
documents, allowing one to perform cited reference searches.
Citation databases provide information that can be used to evaluate a person or a department. While citation
analysis provides a different view of research, some guidelines should be observed in interpreting the results:
- Not all journals are covered in the creation of the source records. Consult the journal lists for the Arts
& Humanities Citation Index, the Science Citation Index (expanded), or the Social Sciences Citation Index at
http://www.isinet.com/listlinx.html.
- A list of publications, with full authorship, should be used to search for cited references. First authors
(last name plus initials) should be used for maximum retrieval of cited references in the Web of Science.
Secondary authors are indexed only if the cited reference has been used as a source document in the citation database.
- Consider the following when searching for an author:
- Names can be misspelled.
- Names with hypens and apostrophes may not be handled consistently.
- Inconsistent use of initials.
- Common names and initials may retrieve papers written by someone with the same name but in a
different discipline.
- If a person is not the first author on a paper that is not covered by the citation index, then one must
search for that paper by the first author.
- Errors may occur in the year, volume and/or page numbers of a citation.
- Self-citation may account for some of the cited references.
- Not all cited references are positive. The initial paper on "cold fusion" has a large number of citations from
papers covering the fact that the results could not be reproduced.
- Book reviews, letters, meeting abstracts, etc. are also source records.
- Review articles may be cited more than those that offer new concepts or ideas.
.
For more information, consult:
- Courtois, Martin. “Tips for searching the ISI citation indexes for personnel decisions.” Database,
16(3): 60-67. 1993.
- Garfield, Eugene. “How to use citation analysis for faculty evaluations, and when is it relevant? Part
1.” Essays of an Information Scientist.
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p354y1983.pdf
- Garfield, Eugene. “How to use citation analysis for faculty evaluations, and when is it relevant? Part
2.” Essays of an Information Scientist.
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p363y1983.pdf
Gayle Baker
University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries
December 5, 2000.