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Citation Searching for Tenure & Promotion Files

Introduction

 

 

Need to include data in your T & P dossier on the number of times your publications have been cited by others? There are many resources you can use to locate citations or references to your work using a process called Citation Searching. Most of these resources are available through WSU Libraries subscriptions, but others offer free access. The links on the left will direct you to resources most relevant to your discipline. Choose the ones you want to try, and then follow the instructions to search for citations to your work.

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Try Scopus for Citation Searching!

The University Libraries recently canceled Web of Science, a major database of peer-reviewed journals from Clarivate used for many years to track citation data for faculty tenure and promotion files. As an alternative, the Libraries has newly subscribed to Scopus, another major database of peer-reviewed journals from Elsevier. Faculty are encouraged to use Scopus, just as they used Web of Science, for citation counts and other data related to their publications.

Important Notes about Citation Searching

  • Citation counts are only one measure of value--they should be considered in conjunction with other measures, such aspeer review, journal evaluation & acceptance rates, publisher quality, etc. Click here for a few helpful evaluation tools, including sources for book reviews. 
  • Citation counts represent a quantitative evaluation of a scholar's work rather than a qualitative one
  • There is no single source that can discover all of the citations to a scholar's work, so it is best to use multiple sources for citation data
  • All sources of citation data have limitations that can affect the results of a citation search.  Some examples include: 1) indexing primarily English-language journals with little coverage of foreign language materials;  2) indexing only the journals in a specialized field; 3) coverage of only a certain range of years; and 4) indexing journals only with no coverage of books or conference proceedings; etc.     

Guides

Scopus

Google Scholar

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