Citation Searches

Colloquium: Thursday, December 11, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

Once you have a found a paper, and have decided that it is of interest to you in some way (because of its results, its methodology, its theory, or whatever) you will naturally also be interested in who else has found the paper interesting. There are a number of ways to find the papers that refer to one you already know, and each approach has advantages and disadvantages.

It’s important to remember, however, that there’s no absolute “science” of citation searching. You cannot decide that a paper is “influential” (in the way that interests you), or “seminal”, or “marginalized” simply by asking one or another database. All the databases can do is to help you find the work of other scholars who have read and interpreted the paper in question.

In this session, Liv will help us to understand the resources that are available to us. The three main tools are Web of Science (also known as the Social Science Citation Index), Scopus, and Google Scholar. Each of them differ according both to functionality (the kind of searches you can do) and coverage (the set of texts that are searched). Liv will take you through a number of hands-on demonstrations.

In order to make this session as useful as possible, please bring your own problems and issues to us so we can address them specifically. It will be helpful if you send Liv a mail to give her time to prepare some searches. Be as specific as possible. What text(s) would like to do citation searches on? And why does it interest you?

See you there.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *