Citation indexes track references that authors put in the bibliographies of published papers. They provide a way to search for and analyze the literature in a way not possible through simple keyword/topical searching. It also enables users to gather data on the "impact" of journals, as well as assessing particular areas of research activity and publication. This field is called bibliometrics.
What Can I Do with Citation Indexes?
Find papers that cite earlier papers.
Find out how many times my papers have been cited.
Determine my h-index.
Find journal impact factors.
Web of Science
Use Cited by in the results list or the Cited Reference Search tab.
The Web of Science is the original citation research database and indexes citation information from the articles in over 12,000 journals worldwide, including open access journals and over 150,000 conference proceedings from the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
View the tutorial for Cited Reference Searching in Web of Science
View the tutorial for Author Searching
CINAHL
Use Cited References in the results list or select the Cited References search option listed under "More."
CINAHL is the premier research database for nursing and allied health literature.
PsycINFO
Selected Cited References from the top menu and search by author or other elements from a specific citation.
PsycINFO provides indexing coverage of all document types, including journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations, and technical reports. The database is international in scope.
Google Scholar
Use Cited By in the search results. Google Scholar includes citations from an array of sources in its cited by calculation, including PowerPoints and Word documents. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Cited reference searching can be used to find out if an article, book, journal, or particular author has been cited by another work.
Cited reference searching is useful for determining the impact of an article, book, journal, or author. It can also be used to identify journals in which to publish, monitor research in a particular field, and identify potential research partners.
Weekly tracking of highly-cited papers and topics in a free Web resource for science metrics and analysis. Includes interviews, essays, podcasts and profiles from scientists, journals, institutions, and nations. Uses citation data from Thomson Reuters (owner of ISI Web of Science). Search for a specific topic or select the "Medicine" tag on the top menu, or browse.