LibAnswers: Library answers

You can check the citations your research outputs have attracted on a range of different databases. It is recommended that you use the Scopus database and find your documents by searching for the title, or looking at your publications list on your author profile.

You can set up alerts that will email to let you know when new citations to research outputs have been received. On the document page on Scopus there is a 'set citation alert' button down the right hand side, and you can choose how often you receive them.

Not all outputs are indexed on Scopus, as it is a curated list of sources. You could look for publications that are not indexed on Scopus on Google Scholar instead, although there is no curation of sources and the range of citation metrics given is much smaller. Web of Science is a similar product to Scopus and you could also check for citations there. 

Different databases may give a different citation counts for the same document and this is due to differences in indexing. In general, Scholar indexes everything regardless of quality, whereas Scopus and Web of Science are both curated indexes of research publications, with Scopus indexing slightly more content overall. Publish or Perish has the ability to aggregate all sources of citation data.

For further help please contact Joanne Fitzpatrick, Research Data Manager: j.fitzpatrick2@lancaster.ac.uk