Citation Analysis: Citation Impact

Citation Analysis - What is it?

Citation analysis is the study of the impact and assumed quality of an article, author, or academic institution based on the number of times works and/or authors have been cited by other researchers.

Citation Analysis - Why use it?

• To find out how much impact a particular article has had by showing which other authors based some work upon it or cited it as an example within their own papers.

• To find out more about a field or topic; i.e. by reading the papers that cite a seminal work in that area.

• To determine how much impact a particular author has had by looking at his/her total number of citations.

This guide covers three different resources for analyzing citations: Scopus, Google Scholar, and alternative methods. Each resource has its own sub-page within this section of the guide.

Much of the content on this section of the guide is adapted with permission from guides created by the University of Michigan Library and the Arizona State University Library. You may access Michigan's Citation Analysis guide here and ASU's guide here.