Finding Articles that Cite Earlier Articles
Citation searching allows you to move forward in time by finding newer papers that cite earlier papers. For information on counting your total citations, see the
Counting Your Citations page. For information on searching for citing articles in SciFinder, see the
SciFinder FAQ page.
The UT System subscribes to Web of Science data back to 1965.
Sample Question: You want to find papers that have cited a paper written by Robert B. Woodward et al. that appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol.73, 1951, pages 2403-04.
- Follow the link to Web of Science or Science Citation Index on the Databases and Indexes pages, or click on the link above.
- Click on "Cited Reference Search".
- Enter the last name and initial(s) of the first author of the paper in question in the CITED AUTHOR field. (Don't use full first names or commas. You should allow for variants by typing an asterisk (*) after the first or second initial: WOODWARD RB*)
- Due to the large number of variant abbreviations and typos in the data, you should usually leave the CITED WORK field blank.
- Enter a year or range of years in the CITED YEAR field. It doesn't matter how old the cited article is.
- Select "Science Citation Index Expanded" and, optionally, the Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Science from the database list, and apply other desired year limits on citing articles.
- Click Search.
- You will see an index list of cited articles. Note the rigid format of the entries, which causes them to sort first by author, then by journal abbreviation and then by date:
Scan the list carefully for typos and variant postings. You'll need to note the page numbers and volume number of the entry to verify it's the exact paper you're looking for. "Cited Work" titles are always abbreviated, sometimes not very consistently. Page numbers and volume numbers can be inaccurate or missing altogether. The number of Citing Articles is the total number of articles in the entire WOS database that cited that particular entry. In this example, the entry with page number "2043" is probably a typo, so that should be selected as well as the correct entry below it.
- Select all desired index entries, set any language or document-type limits at the bottom of the page, and then click Finish Search.
- A list of Citing Papers is retrieved. This list can be re-sorted and analyzed in various ways. The
button in each entry will take you to a menu of options for finding that document in UT's electronic or print collections.
If the cited article is earlier than 1965, the number of records actually retrieved may be less than the number shown in the index listing. This is because the index counts citations in the entire Web of Knowledge database, whereas the retrievable ones are only those since 1965, UT's starting year of coverage. (In this example, only 27 of the 58 citing articles fell after 1965, and only these are retrievable.)
- View full records by clicking on a paper's title. From the full record, you can also look at the citing paper's reference list, or find Related Records citing the same things. The Times Cited figure gives the number of citations to this paper in the subscribed years of the database. (This number often undercounts citations, so use it with caution.)
