Citation Metrics: Articles: Cited Reference Searching: Home

Cited reference searching means searching the list of publications in the bibliography or references at the end of the work. When literature databases index each reference from a publication sometimes those references are searchable. 

Citation statistics for an article or an author are particular to a database; different databases will have different statistics for the same work. Cited Reference searching can give you to citations which are included in references but not actually included in the database - not all of the references will be available.

• A "Cited Reference” generally means having a look at a publication bibliography or list of references.
• “Cited By” or “Times Cited” generally means other articles have citied the given article in their bibliographies
• “Related Records” means other articles which share one or more references with the given article
• All three sources can be included in Cited Reference Searching

Cautions:

• Citation rates vary widely between disciplines; consider rates relative to disciplinary norms
• Self cites will influence cited reference searching results – determine if those are to be included
• Works better for articles than for books
• If subject coverage for your discipline is weak in a database then so will the citation rates be
• Check to see if a journal of interest is included in the database
• Citation errors are frequent; check for slightly different versions. Usually year or volume number, or misspellings.