Cited By

A researcher asked me a question yesterday at the Medical Education poster session at Towsley Center regarding statistics for “cited by” searches.  In case you don’t know what a Cited By search is, these are searches where you determine how many times and by whom your work has been cited.  raditional Cited By searches are conducted using database tools such as Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) or Scopus (Elsevier).  However, as we all know, these resources are only available to those institutions that can afford these extremely expensive products.

Google Scholar (U of M proxy here) is an excellent alternative.  It’s available to the general public for free.  As well all know, this makes me very happy.  More importantly, if you are publishing in non-traditional methods like Open Access journals or to blogs, wikis, online only publications, then Google Scholar may be the only resource that is able to track who is citing you.

Google considers Google Scholar to be Beta, but hey, we know that Google’s beta is often better than anyone else’s production products. Have fun!