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Scholarly Impact and Citation Analysis

Tips and step-by-step directions on how to find citing articles, impact factors, and journal rankings.

WOS: Finding Citing References for an Article

Finding citing references to a specific article:

1. Go to 

2. Click on Cited Reference Search. WOS has 3 citation indexes: Science, Social Science, and Arts & Humanities. You may select one or more indexes that seems most appropriate for your search.  Since each index covers a pool of journals for that particular area, you may find that excluding a particular pool is helpful. Leaving all the indexes activated will cover a broader range of journals. 

WOS cited reference search

3. If you want to search for cited references to a particular article, enter the author, cited work and/or year information. Note that cited work refers to the name of the journal in which the article you are interested in appeared. It is best to put minimum information to ensure that you do not miss any citations.

4. From the search results, select the relevant citations including any “cited reference variants". Add the numbers in the "Citing Articles" column from both the correct citation and the variant-citations together to get the total citation count for the publication.

5. To view the citing articles for selected items, click on the "Finish Search" button.

Caveats:

  • The citation count will only include the number of times the publication was cited by articles from the journals that are covered by Web of Science.
  • The search results may include cited references that are not included in WOS for reasons of journal coverage, format or date. The numbers for these citations will be incomplete.

Search Examples

The images below demonstrate how you would find cited references for (i.e., articles referring to) the following article:

The Regulatory Content of Intergenic DNA Shapes Genome Architecture, C.E. Nelson*, B.M. Hersh*, S.B. Carroll. Genome Biology 2004; 5(4):R25.

WOS cited reference author

 WOS cited reference article list


The screenshot below lists a few of the citing articles. You can follow the FindIt button below each article to determine if the full-text is available.. You can also click on "Analyze Results" to identify trends among citing articles.

WOS cited reference article list