What is citation tracking?
Citation tracking allows you to find out how many times an article has been used as a reference in other articles. Overall, one assumption that can be made is that articles of better quality will be cited more.
This is definitely not a perfect system. The citation numbers can be impacted by articles that are critical of the content, review articles, disproportionate citations that are not related to the quality of the content, and high quality articles can be cited not at all.
Not every database has a citation tracking feature.
You can forward track an article citation by seeing who has cited the article since it was published.
You can back track by looking at the references within the article to see who the current article based their research on.
Why track citations?
There are a few reasons:
- See what came before and after the article you are reading
- Allows you to find the articles that have had the most impact, influence, or are seminal to that topic/field
- Find out who the leading authors are
- Helps you to position the article in the larger narrative
- Find out what the response has been of that article
- Help you identify new areas of research
Tracking Citations
Web of Science
In Web of Science you can search by author, title, topic etc. Once you run a search you can find the citations of an article in Web of Science here:
Google Scholar
You can run a search or for a specific article in Google Scholar. Once you run a search you can find the citations of an article in Google Scholar here:
