Citation Analysis for Promotion & Tenure

What is citation analysis?

Citation analysis is a way of measuring the relative importance or impact of an author, an article or a publication by counting the number of times that author, article, or publication has been cited by other works.

Why conduct citation analysis?

Citation analysis may be conducted for following purposes:

• To establish the impact that a particular work has had by identifying which other authors based their work upon it or cited it within their own papers.
• To learn more about a field or a topic by identifying seminal works in that area.
• To determine what impact a particular author has had within his/her own discipline and beyond by looking at his/her total number of citations broken down by discipline and by country.
• For promotion and tenure purposes by looking at the quality of sources where a scholar’s work has been published and cited

Commonly Used Terms and Definitions

Explanations of terms related to citation counts and journal rankings.

Scopus Searching:

• Searching for a Specific Article or an Author
• Measuring the Scholarly Impact of a School, Department, or an Academic Unit
• Set up alerts for both articles and authors. To create an alert for an article, search for it and then click on the title in your search results. 

CCSU Library's databases:

• Many of the CCSU Library's subscription databases (e.g., Criminal Justice Abstracts, Education Full Text, and SocINDEX) will have links to the articles that have cited an item you have found. These cited references options are based on the the total number of times a publication has been cited within that specific database.

Harzing's Publish or Perish (PoP)

• The Publish or Perish software can be downloaded at no cost.  It analyzes Google Scholar data.

Google Scholar

• If the article has been cited by others, a link reading “cited by” will be part of the Google Scholar record. Clicking on that link will take you to the list of articles that cited the scholarly item.  

Google Scholar allows for the creation of email alerts to keep you notified of new publications. Here are a few of the reasons why you might want to create alerts:

• To stay up to date on a topic of interest
• To make sure you're notified when your name is included in a new publication
• To track the citations to a particular article or author over time