Web of Science offers access to the reference lists of articles in this database. This makes it possible to search for citations: which article cites a known article or book?
For articles indexed by Web of Science, you can find the citing articles by clicking the link Citations in the search results.
Please note: The number of Citations you’ll see reflects citations from all databases in the Web of Science Core Collection, also for the databases the EUR doesn’t subscribe to, like the Book Citation Index. This can cause differences between the number of citations you see in the overview and the number of articles in the results list. In this example the article was cited 41 times, but 40 citing records were found within the licenses of the EUR.
Please note: some authors make sloppy reference lists – it’s possible there are mistakes in the reference, which make it difficult for Web of Science to match the citation to the cited article (that's based on computer algorithms, not hand-picked). It’s also possible that the citation is correct, but Web of Science can’t index the citation correctly, due to more technical reasons. If you need to be absolutely sure about the number of citations within Web of Science, you’ll have to do a cited reference search as well.
To find citations you can also use the Cited References search. In the Cited References search you can search for books or articles NOT indexed by Web of Science: Web of Science searches in the references list of the documents that are indexed to find these citations.
In Step 1 you can search by cited author, title (of the article), work (that’s the journal title or the book title, NOT the article title!), year(s), volume, issue and/or pages. The fields are automatically combined with the AND operator. When you choose to search by cited author or cited work a magnifier glass appears: you can use this option to select authors or titles from the index in Web of Science.
In the search box behind Cited Author and Cited Work you can click the AZ button - this opens the Cited Author Index or the Cited Work Index. This helps you to find the names.
Step 2 (see below) gives you a list of works found – often you find more than expected, for example because Web of Science doesn’t correct mistakes made in reference lists. If an author enters for example the wrong start page of the article in his reference, this will be treated as a different cited reference by Web of Science. Look for these variants as well!
In this example, the second and third 'cited work' have a different page number. The second ‘cited work’ shows the subtitle of the cited article instead of the journal the article was published in.
In the list you mark the cited reference(s) you want to see the citing articles of. Sorting the table can make it easier to find matches. Click See Results to see the citing articles.
In the videos in the Web of Science Core Collection - Cited Reference Searching Series (1.08 and 3.45) you can get more information about the Cited Reference Search of Web of Science.
When you are looking at a full record in Web of Science you see at the right side of the screen the number of citations, and when available, the most recent citing articles. There’s also a button Create citation alert. When you click this button and you’re logged in, you can create an e-mail alert, to get a notification by e-mail when an article is added to Web of Science that cites this particular article.
An overview of your citation alerts is available under Saved Searches and Alerts in the menu on the left side of the screen, where you can modify the settings (including deleting an alert).
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