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Now that we've found a page of results showing which articles have cited the original article we looked up, what do we do with them? These new articles reveal who else is publishing related works and what direction the conversation has taken. This allows us to get a sense of the major players in this field as well as to situate our own thinking amongst that of other researchers.
Let's look more closely at the results page we brought up when we completed the 'Cited Reference Search' in the previous section of this guide. The results page contained 82 articles which have cited the original work. We can do several things with these results:
In the box below we will explore what analyzing the results and creating a citation report look like.
The link to 'analyze' results is located in the top, right corner of the results screen:
When you follow this link, a new screen will open allowing you to choose how you would like to analyze the results.There are a number of ways to analyze your results including by: source title, organization, publication year, document type, and more!
In this example, I've selected to analyze the results by 'organizations'. Once I highlight my selection, I can press 'analyze' and this new information will be generated in the bottom half of the screen:
We can see in this example that Hong Kong Institute of Education is the organization which has published the most articles citing the one we looked up. The second organization on the list is the University of Ghent, and so on. This analysis allows us to discern interesting facts about our research. For instance, the two institutions most heavily citing this article are located outside of the United States.
Using the other ways to analyze the results will reveal additional insights. The analyze citations feature is a powerful tool to learn more deeply about a particular work, its influence, and how it is being used in the current literature.
The link to 'Create Citation Report' is also located in the top, right-hand section of the results page:
Upon following this link, a statistical report is generated with information about all of the articles listed in the results, not just the article you originally searched. If you want to generate a report on a specific author, you can do so by performing a basic author search.
To interpret the data above, we must understand it is calculated for all the results. We can see, using the chart on the right, that these 82 articles have been cited a sum total of 170 times. The average number of times each of these 82 articles has been cited is 2.07.
We can use data such as this to learn more and identify publishing and citation patterns related to our article and its associated field of study.