Who Cited This?
Gail Golderman & Bruce Connolly rate citation sources online
By Gail Golderman & Bruce Connolly -- netConnect, 1/15/2007
Even back in the print era, citation sources—with their intimidating, computer-generated KWIC indexing scheme—were the heavy hitters of the reference collection. A Dialog session on SciSearch—with the clock ticking madly and the ever-present fear of selecting an output format that would result in printing every record and every cited reference—left most early online searchers soaked in sweat that one wrong move could run up a bill of hundreds of dollars in connect time and citation charges.
Today, electronic resources such as ISI Web of Science and Scopus retain their high-end status and correspondingly high price tag while putting their imposing power directly into the hands of contemporary researchers. Virtually any moderately sophisticated online searcher can easily produce precise and comprehensive search results that are thoroughly customized.
It's interesting to note how many “conventional” online products have recognized the value of cited references and have begun incorporating them into their records. And the barbarian at the gate, Google Scholar, is even more interesting. While somewhat uncouth in terms of bibliographic control, by delivering cited references and facilitating access to peer-reviewed scholarly literature, Scholar undercuts those who would prefer to dismiss Google as altogether unsuited for academic research. (Oh, yes, and it's free.)
Google ScholarGoogle
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To see a summary and quick comparison of the databases featured in this article, see the table ataglance below. |
Like many things Google, Scholar is a black box. There is no indication of what journal titles are indexed, how far back coverage extends, what the update schedule might be, what existing e-­resources are being drawn upon, or the comparative coverage of various disciplines. There is no definitive statement of how search results are ordered and no adherence to the basic conventions of bibliographic description.
Google Scholar is free, it's still in beta (after two full years of operation), and it's an amazingly effective resource in many respects.
Searchability Although Google Scholar may be accessed directly (at scholar. google.com), we prefer taking the user through the stripped-down Google homepage when we teach Scholar in a library instruction session or at the reference desk. Having shown students the reassuring sight of the familiar Google search screen, we click on the “more” link (just beyond the links that search the web for Images, Video, News, and Maps) and then select Scholar from the menu that pops up.
In our experience, the notion that Google has some esoteric, previously untapped capabilities that are particularly well suited for work on a research project is a much easier sell than the more prescriptive assertion that Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, say, is the most comprehensive and appropriate source for someone writing a political science paper. Credibility in our world derives from the ease with which we can produce useful results, not from our generally knowing what we're talking about.
The bare Google Scholar home­page, with its beta status clearly tagged, invites the researcher to dive right in, just as Google does. Searching on xenophobia in 17th century britain produces a results list of nearly 500 hits. Keyword terms such as xenophobia are linked to the Answers.com web site so the searcher can immediately check their meaning, pronunciation, and Wikipedia entries. The same search done in vanilla Google links to the results in Scholar, with the most highly cited article listed first in the One Box display.
By default, Scholar displays all articles, but a link to recent articles is available, allowing the searcher to limit by date range back to 1987. While peer-reviewed journal articles make up the overwhelming majority of items in the results list, some results are also tagged with book, citation, or doc ­designations.
Librarians and researchers expecting to see conventional bibliographic citations in the results list will need to readjust since the full complement of standard bibliographic elements are only displayed after the document has been accessed online. Situated immediately below the article titles are the names of the author or authors, journal title, year of publication, and database or online supplier where the document can be found (or purchased) and downloaded.
The title of the document appears as a hyperlink, and clicking on it produces a variety of effects ranging from downloading the desired document (if it comes from a source the user is authorized to access) to viewing just the abstract at a remote resource such as PubMed or the Taylor & Francis web site.
If a library is participating in Google Scholar's Library Links program, the message Full-Text @ My Library appears next to the document titles for those items from subscription databases that may be accessed electronically by the library's users. In some cases, the title and full-text designations are followed by a cryptic note (“group of 5 >>,” for example), which, according to the Scholar help page, indicates that the accompanying link “[f]inds other articles included in this group of scholarly works, possibly preliminary, which you may be able to access. Examples include preprints, abstracts, conference papers or other adaptations.”
Just what does this mean for a researcher working beyond the friendly IP address range of an academic library, since the links show up automatically for users searching from a campus IP? The entry for a 2005 Journal of Finance article entitled, “Do Domestic Investors Have an Information Advantage? Evidence from Indonesia,” indicates there is a “group of 9” entries associated with it. The patient researcher moving down this list will discover that it is possible to “purchase immediate access to this article for 30 days through our secure web site for $29 using a credit card” via the Blackwell Synergy web site and also learn that several links have gone dead. Happily, however, a 2001 version of the article is available in “working paper” or preprint form at institutions with which the author has been affiliated. The key for information retrieval is to click on the “group of” note because it dramatically increases the odds that one of the links will ultimately deliver a document that a researcher can use.
A series of additional links shows up right below the brief bibliographic portion of the record that most searchers are likely to find useful. The first is the “Cited by” link, which identifies how many other documents within Scholar have cited this item. These documents, in turn, have their own full complement of connections within Scholar and out to the web.
A second link allows a researcher to use an item in the results list for a Related Articles search. Clicking on this link brings up a listing of references to other documents published by the same author(s). It will also find documents sharing the same keywords as the original, or, in other words, it will do a Google search on itself.
The next link launches a Web Search beyond the borders of Scholar. When the starting point is a book, clicking Web Search will find the title in online outlets like Amazon.com, at book aggregators like bookfinder.com, in the references associated with an online encyclopedia, or in places like ­JSTOR where the book has been reviewed. Clicking on the Library Search link enables the user to locate a copy of the book in the nearest library by entering the local Zip Code in OCLC's Find in a Library version of WorldCat. Searchers working in libraries that participate in Scholar's Library Links program will see their home library in the search box.
What's interesting about Scholar's Library Search capability is, owing presumably to Google book scanning and indexing, a Scholar search can drill much, much more deeply into the contents of a book than a keyword search in the library OPAC could ever do. When we search in Scholar, we frequently find books (or chapters of books or sometimes just paragraphs and sentences in books) in our own library collection that we never would have turned up by searching the catalog directly.
Scholar's Web Search feature is particularly useful for tracking down somewhat ephemeral documents such as conference papers and proceedings. We were able to retrieve the Aaron G. Cass and Chris Fernandes paper on “Modeling Dependencies for Cascading Selective Undo” at the web site for the INTERACT 2005 workshop proceedings as well as at the personal sites for both authors. Web Search also discovered a closely related paper delivered at the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, so, all in all, using the Web Search capability proved fruitful for locating solid scholarly research material.
In a number of cases, the final link in the results list entry is to BL Direct, the British Library document delivery service incorporating full-text access to 20,000 journals. The service charge begins at £7.45 for immediate download and includes a £0.22 copyright fee (which works out to about $15 at current exchange rates). Google currently receives no compensation from this service.
Advanced Scholar Search gives a number of tools for building more-­precise search strategies. Find article features include searching for documents with all of the words (ANDing), with the exact phrase, with at least one of the words (ORing), or without the words (NOTing). A pull-down menu permits limiting to anywhere in the article or just in the title. Advanced Scholar Search also offers Author, Publication, and Date range searching.
The searcher may also check one or more of the Subject Areas boxes to narrow recall even further. Subject Areas include Biology, Life Sciences, and Environmental Science; Business, Administration, Finance, and Economics; Chemistry and Materials Science; Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics; Medicine, Pharmacology, and Veterinary Science; Physics, Astronomy, and Planetary Science; and Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities.
Output to bibliographic managers is enabled in the Scholar Preferences, and the options include BibTex, Endnote, RefMan, RefWorks, and Wen­XianWang.
None of the features of many high-end e-resources—search history, marking, saving, emailing, sorting, alerts—are available in Scholar.
Price Google Scholar is a free resource, although in terms of real cost it depends heavily on your library's subscription databases as well as open source scholarship on the web for the content it accesses.
Who Needs It? If there is one product that just might enable librarians to wean students from their almost universal (and inappropriate) reliance on Google for conducting academic research, it is, ironically enough, Google Scholar.
Despite the negativity that some in the library community direct toward almost anything Google, we've seen numerous occasions where Scholar produced consistently more useful and more accessible results than a discipline's professional-level online bibliographic resource. Because it gives students the Google experience that they are accustomed to with the peer-reviewed scholarly orientation that their teachers demand, it's hard for us to see Scholar as anything but a valuable, useful, and, above all, usable resource in instruction sessions and reference work.
ISI Web of Science Thomson ScientificContent Available through Thomson's Web of Knowledge SM platform, Web of Science (WoS) consists of three separate bibliographic databases that can be searched independently or in combination. Users can also cross-search multiple ISI and third-party resources, including BIOSIS Previews, Inspec, and Medline. Links to full-text are presented, with access dependent on local holdings. WoS offers online access to the three citation indexes, containing multidisciplinary, scholarly research material from science, social sciences, and arts and humanities journals worldwide—although critics assert these research journals are primarily U.S. and European, with relatively little Third World coverage and a continued weakness in non-English-­language journals.
The resource provides access to current and retrospective information from 230 disciplines and includes Science Citation Index Expanded (1900–present), with 6400 journals covered, 22,000-plus rec­ords added weekly, 420,000-plus new cited references added weekly, as well as 145 highly cited book series; Social Sciences Citation Index (1956–present), with 1800-plus journals covered, 3000-plus records added weekly, 70,000-plus new cited references added weekly, as well as 30 highly cited book series; and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1975–present), with 1100-plus journals covered, 1800-plus records added weekly, 15,500-plus new cited references added weekly, and 15 highly cited book series.
Overall, more than 25 million cited references are captured from reference lists or bibliographies of indexed articles each year. Best known for cited reference searching, WoS citations contain the references cited by the authors of the indexed articles. A cited reference search enables users to find articles that cite a previously published work and fully research an important topic or concept to uncover additional material relevant to their field of study or inquiry.
Searching cited references is a relatively simple way to see how a particular author or group of authors has influenced other work over time. Using the Times Cited option shows the impact on current and possibly future research patterns, potentially permitting searchers to find new unknown material to support a query based on older known information.
There are countless bells and whistles within the Web of Knowledge platform, and new tools include the Analyze Tool, to view rankings of authors, journals, and other fields; Author Finder, a quick four-step process that helps researchers find papers published by an author; Distinct Author Identification System (DAIS), a cluster system to link authors and analyze papers likely written by the same author; Cited Reports, which takes citation data and aggregates and reviews activity over time; and EndNote Web, a bibliographic management system to create persistent web-based libraries of references. The ability to view full author names in the full record was added in November. Future releases will offer the option to search full name, rather than the current abbreviated form, which is often problematic.
Every significant item from the journals selected for coverage is indexed, including full papers, editorials, reviews, commentaries, clinical reports, poetry, letters, meeting abstracts, reprints, music scores, creative prose, and corrections.
Searches can be saved and run as search alerts (managed remotely on the ISI server or maintained on the user's local computer as a text file), and results can be marked to print, save, email, or export directly into EndNote or EndNote Web. Registered users can also create citation alerts to track activity, via email or RSS, for notification whenever an article has been cited by a new article.
Help is context-sensitive, and users can elect to view prerecorded tutorials on the Thomson.com web site. Current offerings include Citation Report, Cited Reference Searching, Citation Alerting, Comprehensive Cited Author Searching, and Cited Reference Searching—Non Journal Literature.
Searchability Fortunately for us nonspecialized searchers, Thomson has listened to past criticism of the search interface and has made some obvious improvements. Users can search with a topic (basic as well as advanced) across all subscribed databases within the Web of Knowledge platform or choose from a pull-down menu. The welcome page also displays individual searchable databases, and the customizable My Preferences shows My Saved Searches, any active Citation Alerts, and My EndNote Web. This personalization offers options to sign in automatically and to choose a starting database and screen if desired. Any active citation alerts remain valid for one year—renewable at any time—and using RSS feeds for this purpose is immediate and simple. Skilled researchers have numerous search options and special features presented (with an emphasis on skilled), and so we will concentrate on the citation searching attribute for this review.
Cited reference searching is a two-step process in WoS: first execute a lookup against the reference index and then select references to search for articles that contain those references.
Select the Cited Ref Search tab on the opening screen to search for articles that cite an article or author. Users can search across all three citation indexes and limit to latest date (one to four weeks), a single year, or date range. The default is all years, based on back-file content owned by your institution.
Search limits can be applied and saved as defaults for future queries, which is useful for long-term projects. Below the limit options are search boxes for Cited Author, Cited Work, and Cited Year(s). Enter the author's name (last name and first initial) and the year the item was published.
Searchers can also try the browse feature in the Cited Author Index to locate primary cited authors as well. The retrieved set is called the Cited Reference Index. Each line refers to a work that matches the search criteria, and the same work is often referenced in multiple lines based on the citation, which is sometimes erroneous. We all know about citation reliability, so be prepared to look for variants in cited dates, volume numbers, pagination, and especially author spelling. The number at the start of each line represents how many times the reference has been cited in other works.
Users can select Show Expanded Titles to see full article titles and journal titles on this page or View record to retrieve the full record of a cited item. These options are not available if the item is a reference to an article published outside the range of the library's subscription, if the item is a reference to an article published in a journal that is not indexed in WoS, or if the item is a reference to a book, thesis, or other type of publication not indexed. Mark the relevant lines and select Finish Search.
The system generates a list of articles that cite one or more of the items selected on a summary page. Every article listed contains a cited reference matching one of the selected references. Results can be further refined, limited by subject category, source titles, document types, authors, and publication years.
A sidebar offers options for output, including sorting by latest date, times cited, relevance, first author, source title, and publication year. Additional selections include analyzing rankings of authors, creating citation reports, printing, emailing, saving, or exporting to bibliographic reference software.
Price Pricing for WoS is based on numerous variables, including FTE for academic institutions, membership in a consortium, portion of the total file desired, and the number of simultaneous users. Although exact pricing cannot be disclosed, the annual subscription is not cheap. Back files are available as groups of years for a one-time payment.
Who Needs It? WoS is a well-established general science resource employed in the libraries of small academic colleges as well as large government, corporate, and research institutions, and its strength remains within the arts, humanities, and social science arena. Although Elsevier's Scopus (below) emerged nearly three years ago as a genuine competitor to shake up the ISI monopoly, we have yet to see evidence that many institutions have given up one for the other, nor can most afford to maintain the rather pricey subscription to both, at least from our academic perspective. We will save that discussion for a future review, as the two products continue to generate ample comparison literature.
The copious features and integration/ cross-platform functionality within Web of KnowledgeSM have significantly improved WoS, and although it is still not the most user-friendly resource on the market, the powerful cited reference searching is hard to refute. With the Citation and Analyses Reporting, as well as several of the other functions mentioned, we see this as a valuable tool for upper-level, graduate, and, most specifically, scholarly use.
ISI also includes access to ISIHighlyCited.com, a free web-based service that provides the research of the most highly cited individuals from within 21 broad subject categories in life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, engineering, and social sciences for the period 1981–99.
ScopusElsevier B.V.Content Scopus aims to provide subscribers with comprehensive indexing and abstracting coverage to the scientific, technical, medical, and social science literature going back to 1966. The 28 million records in the database derive from some 15,000 scholarly titles, representing 4000 global publishers. (In fact, 60 percent of the titles are published outside the United States.) There are 3400 titles in the life sciences, another 5300 providing access to health (including a 100 percent overlap with Medline), about 2850 social sciences titles, and 5500 titles representing the physical sciences, so subject coverage is widely distributed.
Additionally, Scopus supplies bibliographic content for 500 open access journals, 700 conference proceedings, 600 trade publications, and over 125 book series. Since researchers find valuable information outside the conventional scholarly literature, Scopus also provides access to 250 million quality web pages and 13 million patents. Most researchers, however, are likely to regard the 245 million references that are integrated with the basic bibliographic records starting from 1996 as Scopus's major contribution to the research process. There's a lot here, to put it mildly.
Searchability Users connecting to Scopus immediately see buttons that will take them to their personal lists of documents and alerts, as well as to their registered profile. They may also browse the Sources listing, which has two dozen broad Subject Areas and four Source Types (Trade Publications, Journals, Conference Proceedings, Book Series). A Quick Search box facilitates look-ups, and Article Linker and Library Catalogue buttons provide immediate access from the Source list to the subscribing library's holdings.
The main Search page default is Basic Search, but Author Search and Advanced Search are readily accessible in tabs. The Basic Search template has two boxes for entering search terms, and Scopus's designers provide a simple example that illustrates both phrase searching and Boolean operations. Pull-down menus permit field searching (with Article Title, Abstract, Keywords as the default), and the user can combine the two lines of the search strategy using AND, OR, or AND NOT.
Limits are not just prominently displayed but also very easy to grasp and employ. Limits include Date Range (both by year as well as by records added to the database within the past seven, 14, or 30 days), Subject Area (where the searcher can include or exclude Life Sciences, Health Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences titles by checking or unchecking a box), and Document Type.
We ran a search on human computer interaction OR hci with the Physical Sciences Subject Area checked. When the results lists (with its 17,000-plus hits) displays, Scopus gives the searcher a number of valuable tools for increasing precision, including Source Title, Author Name, Year, Document Type, or Subject Area. We checked two likely sounding sources—Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (because we were looking for information on the sort of cutting-edge advances that researchers tend to present at conferences) and the journal Human Computer Interaction—under the Source Title option.
Items in the Scopus Results list are loaded with opportunity. There is, of course, the basic bibliographic information, abstract, and complete bibliographic details of all the References cited by a paper's author (as well as their abstracts and references). Inclusion of authors' mailing address at their institution and a link to their email address make direct contact simple. Buttons are available to access online content and library catalog information associated both with the Results and References lists.
After a document has been selected, the right side of the screen identifies how many times this article has been cited since 1996, displays the most recent citing documents, and invites the searcher to view the details of the citing documents. Registered users can set up an email alert or an RSS feed informing them whenever this document is cited in the future. Scopus will also identify Web Sources and Patents that have cited the document.
Additionally, searchers can ask Scopus to find documents related to their selected document based on its references (which gives the researcher a fresh perspective on the literature by identifying the works that the cited references share in common), the author, or keyword.
Advanced Search allows the experienced searcher to construct very sophisticated search strategies by combining search terms with Scopus codes (DOCTYPE, LANGUAGE, SUBJAREA), and Boolean and proximity operators from an extended list. Searches that start in the Basic tab can be enhanced from the Advanced area, and Scopus codes come attached.
Unlike ISI, Scopus has an Author Search feature that enables the user to attach the various formats a person is identified by and OR them together. Searching on the HCI researcher Geri Gay brings up four variations of her name and affiliations. This feature enables a more sophisticated and comprehensive literature review.
Expert indexing is a Scopus hallmark. While this may be a new product for some researchers, because Scopus employs the controlled vocabularies developed specifically for GEOBASE, Medline, Engineering Index, and several other resources (including author-supplied keywords), anyone making the transition from those databases to Scopus should have a fairly easy period of adjustment.
While Scopus is relatively easy to use, there is so much here that some users might find it a little daunting. The Scopus solution? Scopus Live Chat, its online technical support service, which is available 24 hours a day, Monday through Friday.
Price Scopus pricing is based on an institution's FTE population, and it is expensive. Union College, with nearly 2500 FTE students, would pay in the neighborhood of $30,000/year, although discounts may be available. Licensing specifically permits remote and walk-in users to access the resource.
Who Needs It? Cadillac? Jaguar? Lexus? It's difficult to resist a luxury car analogy when thinking about this resource. In terms of content first and foremost, user customization, and search features, there is little about Scopus that does not represent the very best that the industry has to offer.
| Audience | Content | Dates | Rating | |
| Google Scholar WEB Google Inc. www.google.com 650-253-0000 | HS, UG, SCH, SPEC | Free access to the peer-reviewed scholarly literature in Biology, Life Sciences, and Environmental Science; Business, Administration, Finance, and Economics; Chemistry and Materials Science; Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics; Medicine, Pharmacology, and Veterinary Science; Physics, Astronomy, and Planetary Science; and Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities; full text available via linking to library subscription databases and open access content | Not specified | B |
| ISI Web of Science WEB Thomson Scientific scientific.thomson.com 800-336-4474, x1405 isi.orders@thomson.com | UG, SCH, SPEC | Includes Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index via the Web of Knowledge platform; cross-searchable multidisciplinary, scholarly research material from nearly 9000 science, social sciences, and arts and humanities journals; content includes full papers, editorials, reviews, commentaries, clinical reports, poetry, letters, meeting abstracts, reprints, music scores, creative prose, corrections, and more; provides over 1.1 million records and more than 25 million cited references per year | Indexing and abstracting from 1900–present (Science); 1956–present (Social Sciences); 1975–present (Arts); includes back-file access | A |
| Scopus WEB Elsevier B.V. www.scopus.com 888 615 4500 usinfo@scopus.com | UG, SCH, SPEC | Comprehensive indexing and abstracting coverage to the scientific, technical, medical, and social science literature back to 1966; the 28 million records in the database are derived from 15,000 scholarly titles; bibliographic content for 500 open access journals, 700 conference proceedings, 600 trade publications, and 125+ book series; access to 250 million web pages and 13 million patents; 245 million cited references are associated with the basic bibliographic records starting from 1996 | Indexing and abstracting from 1966 present Cited references available from 1996 to present | A- |
| Key HS: High School UG: Undergraduates SCH: Scholarly Researchers SPEC: Subject Specialists | ||||
| Author Information |
| Gail Golderman (goldermg@union.edu) is Electronic Resources LIbrarian, and Bruce Connolly (connollb@union.edu) is Reference & Bibliographic Instruction Librarian, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady, NY |
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