Major citation databases

Tools containing citation data

Choosing the right tool for the job

Although a number of different databases provide citation counts for the documents they contain, three popular multidisciplinary sources of citation counts include Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. A newer tool, OpenAlex, has recently become available.
Please note that Concordia University no longer subscribes to Scopus.

Which resource should you choose? 

There is no straightforward answer to this—each resource indexes a different combination of publications, so the list of a researcher's documents contained in each, as well as their associated citation counts, are likely to differ.  No single citation index will provide a complete citation count.  By searching a number of citation indices you can gain a better idea of the actual citation count for a particular article.

Web of Science

Web of Science is composed of multiple citation indices owned by Clarivate. This database allows you to find citation counts for individual documents, in addition to running a citation analysis on sets of publications.

If you are looking for a specific document: run a search for the document’s title. If the document is indexed in Web of Science, you will be able to navigate to that document’s record to determine the number of items in Web of Science that have cited it.

If you are looking for the documents published by a specific author: run a Researcher search by switching from the “Documents” tab to the “Researcher” tab in the database’s Core Collection. You can then search by Name, Author Identifier (ORCiD or Web of Science ResearcherID), or Organization. If that author has documents indexed in Web of Science, you will be able to navigate to an author record that provides a list of their documents, and various metrics for the documents in that list.
Note: Carrying out this kind of search can help in the retrieval of a list of works an individual has written; however, it may involve some manual checks to ensure that the documents in the list should indeed be attributed to the researcher under consideration.

Once you have generated a list of publications for analysis, you can generate a citation report to view graphs and summary data.

Watch a video detailing this process: Web of Science Citation Report.

Something to consider when carrying out this kind of analysis is the propensity for small errors made by authors in their reference lists. Web of Science takes this into account with their Cited Reference Search option. A Cited Reference Search can potentially provide a more accurate citation count for a particular paper.

Watch a video detailing this process: Web of Science Core Collection: How to do a Cited Reference Search.

A Cited Reference Search can also be carried out to determine citation counts for items that have not been indexed in Web of Science, but have been cited by documents indexed in the resource.

OpenAlex

OpenAlex collects data from a variety of sources in order to identify scholarly works, authors and institutions.

If you are looking for a specific document: select "works" from the dropdown menu below the search box on OpenAlex's main page and run a search for the document's title. If the document is indexed in OpenAlex, you will be able to navigate to that document's record to determine the number of items in OpenAlex that have cited it.

If you are looking for the documents published by a specific author: select "authors" from the dropdown menu below the search box on OpenAlex's main page and run a search for a researcher's name. If that author has documents indexed in OpenAlex, you will be able to navigate to a page that provides a list of their documents, and various metrics for the documents in that list, on the right-hand side of the screen.
Note: It is important to check that the documents in the list provided by OpenAlex, should indeed be attributed to the researcher under consideration.

Google Scholar

Publish or Perish software allows you to search Google Scholar for your work and determine bibliometric values without a Google Scholar Author Profile, however, you’ll have the greatest amount of control by creating a Google Scholar Author Profile and associating your documents with that profile.

Other Databases

It could very well be that your area of research does not receive good coverage in Scopus, Web of Science or Google Scholar, but receives better coverage in one of the databases listed below. In that case, you may want to consult the citation counts provided by the following individual databases. Keep in mind, these databases may not have the citation analysis functionality like that of Scopus or Web of Science. You may end up having to export data (when possible) to another file format in order to carry out an analysis.

SciFinder:
For each article you can select "Get Citations for this Reference" button (identified by a quotation mark icon).

PubMed (Medline):
In individual article records, there is a section titled "Cited by" which takes you to a list of the articles available for free in PubMed Central that have cited that article.

MathSciNet:
In individual article records, there is a section titled “Citations”.

IEEE Xplore:
Click on the “Citations” section of the menu on the left-hand side of each article’s record to get a list of the documents citing that article. Clicking on the “Metrics” section will give comparison citation counts from Crossref, Scopus and a link to Google Scholar citations as well.

ProQuest databases:
Gives a “Cited on ProQuest” count in individual article records.

EBSCO databases (Academic Search Complete):
Gives a “Cited by” tab for some documents.