This section of the guide introduces resources that count citations to articles in scholarly publications.
Keep in mind:
Citation counts are provided in a number of indexing and abstracting databases: e.g. an article has been "cited by X (or N) number of articles". Citation counts typically include only items within that resource, and the data sources may be incomplete.
Citations appearing in books are significantly underrepresented in many of these resources.
Cross-disciplinary comparisons of article impact metrics are not valid because of disciplinary differences in publication and citation patterns.
Step by Step Instructions (pdf) Scroll to last page.
How to do a Cited Reference Search: Video
Find a list of discipline-specific databases on the Research Guide for your topic. Note that these databases count only the citations to a work that occur in the database. Citations in journals and books not indexed in the database are not incuded.
EBSCO Databases (View a list)
Not all EBSCO databases display citation counts, but many do, including Academic Search Complete and PsycINFO. To see whether an EBSCO database includes citation counts, connect to the database, then look for Cited References at the top or under the More drop-down box at the top of the screen:
Select Cited References and fill in the search boxes.
ProQuest Databases (View a list)
Citation counts appear on the result list and in the full record for each item.
Medline via Ovid ("Find citing articles")
PubMedCentral (free online journal articles)
Many databases include a citation alert feature that notifies you each time an article is cited.