Citation databases and tools for analyses

Web of Science  is a platform for a number of databases. Many of these are citation databases. The SLU library subscribes to the citation databases Web of Science Core Collection, Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, Russian Citation Index and SciELO Citation Index. The number of citations is shown in the right hand margin for each document in a hitlist, regardless of which database the search was performed in. To achieve reproducible results it is important to know which databases  were included in the analysis. For bibliometric analyses it is common that only Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (all included in Web of Science Core Collection) are used. A search can be limited to these databases by selecting them under 'More settings' on the search page of Web of Science.

Journal Citation Reports contains information on Journal impact factor (JIF) for more than 11000 journals and is available as a separate database on the platform Web of Science.

Scopus  is a very large database with coverage in science, medicine, technology, social sciences, arts and humatities. Number of citations for each publication in a hitlist is shown in the right hand margin, very similar to how it is shown in the citation databases of Web of Science. The content in Scopus and Web of Science is overlapping but not completely. This is one of the reasons that bibliometric analyses will not yield exactly the same results in the two databases.

Tools for citation analyses in Scopus includes: 

• Citation Overview (with h-index) 
• Compare Sources
• Using Scopus article metrics

Google Scholar  contains information about references and citations. Google Scholar is a search engine, and not a structured reference database as Scopus or Clarivate Analytics citation databases. It indexes scientific information from a large number of sources. In addition to scientifically reviewed articles it retrieves references from books, theses, conference materials and more. The result of a search is often very big, and sorted in relevance order according to the criteria of Google Scholar. Search results should always be carefully reviewed before use in a citation analysis, but even more so for Google Scholar data.  

You can create an account in Google Scholar Citations where you can gather your own publications and other work and see some analyses.

For analysis and visualization of networks and collaborations between researchers, institutions and countries there is freely available software to download from the Internet, for example:

• Gephi 
• Pajek 
• Cite-Space
• WosViewer
• CitNetExplorer

SCImago Journal & Country Rank  is a portal with indicators for journals, countries and research areas, calculated based on data from Scopus. It also provides possibilities to visualize co-citation networks.