The MSK Library subscribes to a subset of bibliographic databases called Citation Analysis Tools, including Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier). When you conduct literature searches in these databases, along with the standard citation and abstract information for the article, you also get to see each article’s bibliography, as well as, which publications have cited that article since its publication.
Here’s why these databases are considered to be “powerhouse” research tools by librarians:
- Great for electronically harvesting relevant citations from the bibliographies of relevant articles. These are very useful tools for identifying more articles that are similar in topic to the one where you begin your search (potentially leading to both older articles and more current ones).
- Quick and easy way to filter out a seminal paper on your favorite topic or the highest impact publication by an individual author or organization. These databases include great sorting options, for example, the ability to display the list of results by the number of Times Cited by other publications (in descending order).
- Provide ability to analyze the scholarly impact of a particular publication or author. Since they include the cited reference statistics, these tools also generally have the functionality to calculate various metrics of scholarly output, for example, H-indexes.
To learn more about Citation Analysis Tools, feel free to contact us at the MSK Library.