Cited Reference Searching & Journal Rankings: Web of Science (social sciences and humanities, too) - Search Tips

How to locate articles and other documents that have cited a previously published document. Also how to determine where a journal is ranked in relation to others in its field.

Web of Science Training Videos

Below are links to a couple of videos from the Web of Science Training Group.

Web of Science - Cited Reference Search

Web of Science covers almost 9300 high impact journals from around the world.  It encompasses three citation indexes:

  • Science Citation Index Expanded,
  • Social Sciences Citation Index, and
  • Arts & Humanities Citation Index.

Marquette's subscription covers citing articles from 1980 to the present.  Older articles can be searched but only the citing articles from 1980 to the present will be displayed.

How to do a cited reference search:

1. On the main Web of Science search page   Select the Cited Reference Search option:

2. Enter the last name of the primary (first listed) author followed by the first initial in the Cited Author box.  Type OR and add the author's last name followed by the first and middle initial.  Use an asterisk after the first initial if the middle initial is unknown.

3. Enter the abbreviated title of the cited work followed by an asterisk in the Cited Work box (use the View abbreviations list link to find abbreviation) and click Search.

For example, enter the author and abbreviated title as shown below to identify papers citing the following article: Flaskerud, J. H., et al.  (2002).  Health disparities among vulnerable populations.  Nursing Research, 51(2), 74-85.

4. The resulting list of cited references may include variants due to differing citation formats and occasional citation errors, e.g. example below shows the correct citation and two variants which probably refer to the same article.  If the results include too many potentially matching references, redo the search and add a four digit year in the Cited Year(s) box. Use OR or a hyphen to indicate a range of years (e.g., 2004 OR 2005; 2004 - 2005.)  Another option would be to deselect one or more citation indexes to be searched, especially if the author name is fairly common.  This should be done with caution however due to the interdisciplinary nature of many fields.

5. Click in the boxes next to references you wish to select as in the example above and click: Finish Search.  Results will be displayed on the subsequent screen:

Detailed instructions with tips for conducting comprehensive cited reference and other searches are available in the following tutorials: