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Literature Mapping Tools

Resources for citation tracking

Citation tracking involves using citation data to measure the impact of an article. The citation measures and tools offered by many library database providers can include citation mapping, citation reports, citation tracker, h-graph or h-index. Using information such as cited references (cited by or times cited) and related citations can help to measure the impact of research and scholars. When searching in databases, look for "Cited by" links in the results records. Some databases only include links to cited articles found within their database (e.g., Web of Science), while others may include links from different sources (e.g., Google Scholar).

Note that the ability to create a visual map will depend on whether the database offers that functionality. 

Cited Reference Search - Search for records that have cited a published work, and discover how a known idea or innovation has been confirmed, applied, improved, extended, or corrected.

Citation Reports - Citation reports include citations to source records indexed within a WoS database. We recommend you perform a Cited Reference Search* to include citations to items not indexed in the WoS database.

The Citation Map functionality in WoS is no longer available due to technology compatibility issues and reliance on browser support of Java.

Find short, informative videos on the WoS learning platform: Getting Started with Web of Science Core Collection; look under "Navigating the Citation Network"

Scopus offers metrics at the journal, document and author levels. With the document metrics, you can:

* see citation overviews
* create graphs
* compare citation counts
* link to citing documents

How to view document metrics in Scopus tutorial (3:37 min. video tutorial)

The Scopus Citation Overview is a way to find, check and track citation data. It lets you track data year by year for a specific author or topic. With the Scopus Citation Overview you can evaluate:

* the most highly cited author in a field and check that author's relevance
* the real-time citation data of articles and authors of interest
* which topics are hot in familiar or unfamiliar subject areas
* which subjects are being cited by other subjects

How to create citation overview tutorial (2:48 min. video tutorial)

CAS SciFinder-n offers two visualization tools for an interactive view of the connectivity between references.

Citation Map - includes backward and forward citations for a reference search result, and has built-in, color-coded relevance ranking and filtering by document type, author, and concept. You also have the ability to view Reference Details, including those for citations within a Citation Map reference. See a short video overview here, and read more information here.

Knowledge Graph - allows you to generate a visualization based on the first 150 answers based on the current filters and sort order. Users can create a Knowledge Graph to visualize connections between references, authors, substances, concepts, and organizations. Learn more here.