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Counting Your Citations


Researchers often want to know "How many times have my publications been cited?" This is much more easily asked than answered, and you should exercise caution in gathering and using these numbers. You may underreport your citations if you aren't careful. The methods described here use Web of Science. Be sure to ask for help if you need it.

The Quick Method

This method is easiest, but excludes your publications that were It also is less able to distinguish among authors with the same surname/initial(s), so it may include stray hits. In addition, this method relies on the articles' "Times Cited" values that may undercount your total actual citations.

If you need greater precision, use instead the more thorough (and more tedious) method below.

  1. Enter Web of Science, and choose Search. (Don't use Cited Reference Search here.)
  2. Click "Author Finder" link under the search box.
  3. Enter your last name and first initial. Don't use a middle initial.
  4. Select the author entry that best matches yourself. You can select only one here; if more than one is likely you, select the "Increase Results" entry to get them all.
  5. Skip the Subject Categories screen, and click Next. (You can pick only one, and ISI's assignment in these broad areas is unpredictable.)
  6. Select any/all institutions that you have been affiliated with. Then click Finish.
  7. From the results screen, click on Create Citation Report. The Citation Report ranks the results in descending order of citations and provides a year-by-year summary of citations, a sum of Times Cited, an average citations-per-article figure, an option to remove self-citations, and the h-index* for this set of articles. It's a good idea to browse the entire report and mark and remove any entries that aren't yours.

* The h-index

The h-index is the number of articles N in a ranked list that have N or more citations. For example, an h-index of 20 means that there are 20 items in the list that have 20 or more citations. It is akin to a median, and useful because it discounts the disproportionate weight of highly cited and uncited papers. If you want to compare your h-index to someone else's, you need to normalize the values by dividing them by a time factor, e.g. years since PhD or some other agreeable measure. The h-index will be higher and more stable for authors who have been active for a long time and/or who are very prolific. It is more volatile and less useful for younger academics.

Any ranked list of papers can be used to derive an h-index; it is not a calculation unique to Web of Science. But it is critical that the list and the citation data be as accurate and reliable as possible, as well as reproducible -- otherwise the number is meaningless. h-indexes calculated from Google Scholar or other free web services are impossible to verify and should be considered highly unreliable.

The h-index was developed by J.E. Hirsch and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46): 16569-16572, November 15 2005. See also Reflections on the h-index by A.W. Harzing.

A More Thorough Method

  1. Start with your vita or a complete publications bibliography, and look up each individual paper in turn.

  2. In Web of Science, click on Cited Reference Search.

  3. Citation data are scanned and entered into WOS as printed. No corrections or correlations are made by ISI. The only processing done is to standardize the Cited Work abbreviation when possible, and to parse the citation for tabular entry and indexing: Cited Author, Cited Work, Year, Volume, and Page. Any errors in the original citation will be replicated in the database.

  4. Prefer searching on the paper's FIRST AUTHOR whenever possible, even if you're not the first author.

    • Cited author names are indexed by surname, followed by up to two initials; full given names are not used. Using a * wildcard symbol after the first initial is highly recommended. Example: PAULING, L* You can use a middle initial if you want to, or when it's necessary to narrow down a search on a common surname (ex.: SMITH, DK).

    • Watch out for other authors with identical names and initials. If your name is a fairly common one, your papers will be mixed in with those of other authors with the same name, and you'll have to filter these out manually.

    • Lengthy surnames, Asian names, and compound names can be problematic. The ISI databases enter cited authors exactly as they appear in the citing papers, so misspellings, typos, and inversions are very common. It's advisable to try searching several different variants to make sure you find as many as possible. For example, if your name is Richard Smith-Jones, try SMITHJONES, R*; SMITH-JONES, R*; JONES, RS; etc. Try to anticipate how citing authors might misstate or misinterpret this kind of name. WoS limits the author surname to 15 characters.

  5. Leave the Cited Work search box blank, because you will miss entries that have errors or variants in this field. Enter the year in the Cited Year field. Click Search.

  6. When you pull up the index list of cited articles, note carefully the variant and erroneous entries of individual papers, and select all likely matches. Some entries will lack volume or page numbers, and some will have variant cited work abbreviations or incorrect or inverted vol/page numbers or years. You must use your judgment to determine which are likely matches and which are not.

  7. If the paper does not appear in this index at all, this means it has not been cited in an ISI source publication.

    ISI tracks citations from various sources. The bulk come from the 6650 Source Journals covered in Science Citation Index-Expanded. (You can browse and search a list of Source Journals by following the link next to the Cited Work search box.) In early 2009 ISI added citation data from its Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes, which increased overall citation numbers. UT does not subscribe to these segments however, so citing papers from them are not visible to us.

    If a citation to one of your papers is in a publication not covered by ISI, that citation will not be represented. Examples of citations not covered are those in: books, dissertations, patents, web pages, etc. On the other hand, it does not matter where the cited document appeared -- only where the citing paper was.

  8. Add up the Citing Articles numbers in the Index list for each entry that matches the paper in question.

    Why stop here? The reason is complicated. If your paper was published before 1975 and you mark the desired entries and click FINISH SEARCH, you will probably retrieve a smaller number of citations. The Index entries reflect the totality of the Web of Science database, including the Proceedings indexes and SCI records back to 1900, while the actual search results include only those from our subscribed portion of Science Citation Index, i.e. from 1975 forward. If you do choose to finish the search, don't use the SELECT ALL option -- this will eliminate "duplicates" and will also result in a lower count.

  9. If you want to remove self-citations (papers where you cited your own previous work), you can do this using the Advanced Search mode. First, select all desired entries from the Index list and click the Finish Search button. Then, click on Search and search your name as Author (not Cited Author). Finally, go to Advanced Search and combine these results with your previous hit set using the NOT operator: "#1 NOT #2".

  10. You can set up a Citation Alert in Web of Science. This allows you to register and receive an email alert when a new citation to a particular paper is added to the database.

What About Google Scholar?

Google Scholar includes a "Cited by" count in its display of individual entries. This is calculated from citations appearing in other articles indexed by Google Scholar. Clicking on this link will take you to the list of citing articles. Since it is impossible to determine with any accuracy what publications Google Scholar does or does not index, this is not a reliable or reproducible figure and will probably differ significantly from totals found in Web of Science. The "Publish or Perish" software from Harzing.com (a free program that gathers and analyzes GS citation data) recommends against using Google Scholar as a source of citation data in the natural sciences.

Go back to Using Citation Indexes