SCOPUS AND WEB OF SCIENCE

Scopus is a subscription database from Elsevier  that is an alternative to Thompson's  Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports.  This resource offers a larger range of journals than Web of Science but, like Web of Science,  also has a science focus over the humanities and social sciences.  It is available from the list of databases on the web site of the  Adelphi University Libraries.

To find the articles that have cited you please read below and click on links to see examples:

1. Click on the Author search tab, then enter your last and first names in the appropriate boxes. You can also restrict your search to a subject area (e.g., life sciences) if you wish, or enter your professional affiliation
2. Click the search button and look for your name in the resulting list.
3. Click  your name if you want to go to your author page. Click on Get citation alerts to receive an email when a new article citing you is added to the database (you'll need to create a free personal account with Scopus if you haven't done so before)..
4. Click View citation overview to see who has cited you and when (click on the numbers in the table to view citing documents). You can also choose to remove self-citations.

For each article you can then analyze the metrics that Scopus provides, including the number of citations you have in the database and the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), which measures how well cited your article is in Scopus when compared to similar ones.  In addition, Scopus provides Plum Analytics, which captures the impact of your article within social media (see the Altmetrics tab).

An additional metric is the h-index, which is based on the highest number of an author's publications that have had at least the same number of citations.  For example, a scholar with an h index of 4 has published at  least 4 papers, each of which has been cited by others at least 4 times.

There are several metrics for serial titles in Scopus.

• CiteScore  measures average citations received ro each document published in that serial.

• SJR (SCImago Journal rank) measures weighted citations received by the serial .The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database.  This platform takes its name from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, developed by SCImago from the algorithm Google PageRank. This indicator shows the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus database from 1996.

• SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) measures the actual citations received relative to citations to be expected for the serial's subject field.measures a source’s contextual citation impact. It helps make a direct comparison of sources in different subject fields. SNIP is the ratio of a source's average citation count per paper, and the 'citation potential' of its subject field. The citation potential of a source's subject field is the average number of references per document citing that source. It represents the likelihood of being cited for documents in a particular field. A source in a field with a high citation potential will tend to have a high impact per paper. SNIP thus attempts to correct for varying levels of citation potential depending on a subject area by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field.   The impact of a single citation is higher value in a subject area where citations are less likely, and vice versa.

Click on Compare sources to compare up to 10 Scopus sources on a variety of parameters, including those outlined above.  The journal analyzer includes data from 1996 to the current year. When citations are calculated for a source, documents published before 1996 are not included, because complete citation information for documents published prior to 1996 is not available in Scopus.  The analyzer is available in both a line chart and a table view. The line chart displays information in a line graph, with separate graphs for each parameter. The table lists parameters together in one table.

Click here to learn more about the metrics behind SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)

Web of Science, from Thomson Reuters, is the original citation research source as it provides access to the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Index, although its coverage strongly favors the sciences.  It covers selected journals that are considered by ISI to be the most prestigious and high impact journals worldwide.

But a citation search in Web of Science is NOT a complete citations search: Only citations from primarily English language journals are included, and  citation data from books, and conference proceedings, dissertations & theses, patents and technical reports are not covered.  Therefore fields that publish heavily in the journal literature, such as the sciences, are better covered than those that don't, such as history. In addition, subjects are not covered evenly by date: Science journals are covered much further back in time than are those in the arts, engineering, humanities and social sciences. And some subject areas, including business, are poorly covered!

The associated Journal Citation Reports measure research influence and impact at the journal and category levels.  The journal impact factor measures the importance of a journal by calculating the number of times its articles are cited.  But there are limitations to using impact factors to evaluate a scholar's output since a single factor is not enough for evaluating a body of work.  The impact factor was also originally developed to show the impact of a specific journal, not a specific author.  Most important, journal values are meaningless unless compared with otters within the same discipline; impact factors vary widely among disciplines!

This database is not subscribed to by the Adelphi Libraries due to its prohibitively  high cost; contact your library liaison to get information about where to access it at nearby institutions.