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WILD 401: Fish and Wildlife Capstone

What is citation analysis?

Citation analysis is a way to determine the impact of an author, an article, or an institution by tracking the number of times a work or an author has been cited by others. Unfortunately, this is not a simple process because there is no single source that covers all publications or their cited references. This section of the guide highlights some resources at the MSU Library that can help in the creation of citation counts.

What is cited reference searching?

Cited references are the articles, books or other materials listed in a bibliography or as works cited in a particular publication. Because citation databases index each reference, it is possible to search these cited references. One can follow a particular cited reference, or cited author, forward in time to find more current articles that have also cited that author or work.

Why use cited reference searching?

  • To locate current research based on earlier research
  • To find out how many times and where a publication is being cited
  • To find out who is citing a particular paper
  • To find out how a particular research topic is being used to support other research
  • To track the history of a research idea
  • To track the research history of a researcher
  • To determine how well your own published research is cited for promotion/tenure considerations

Databases with citation tracking

ScholarWorks: MSU's Open Access Research Repository

ScholarWorks captures the intellectual work of Montana State University in an open access institutional repository. ScholarWorks is a central point of discovery for accessing, collecting, sharing, preserving, and distributing knowledge to the MSU community and the world.

The library can help assess the copyright of papers for submission into ScholarWorks.

Learn how to submit, and how ScholarWorks can help you to boost your citation rates as well as to archive your publications, making it accessible to other researchers everwhere.