Three things that I learned today was that I learned you can view how much an author is cited for a certain article or research paper. Two I learned that most professors have a CV which is basically their resume. And also I learned that Marquis Who’s Who database can be useful when you want to find certain information about an author or one of his papers.
One thing I am still unclear of is that if we cant find anything on any of the databases that pertains to how much an author is cited, and if google is not necessarily dependable, then what is the best option to locating how much something gets cited?
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Blake, that’s an excellent question. I didn’t really get around to explaining in class today that the database, Web of Science, doesn’t cover every single journal out there. As you are correct in wondering about, there might be times when an author’s article might not be in Web of Science because the database doesn’t bother to track articles from the journal where the article was published. Web of Science isn’t the only subscription database out there that provides citation counts; another one is Scopus, which we don’t have here at Baruch. The journals that Scoups tracks overlap to a great extent with the ones that Web of Science does, but it probably also tracks some journals not in Web of Science. So theoretically, if you couldn’t get a citation count in Web of Science for a given article, you could go to Scopus.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a professional researcher is probably reading or scanning quickly many journal articles in the areas where he/she does research. Keeping up with the literature that way can help you keep track of who is publishing what and who is getting cited. It’s not a scientific approach, but it is still a valuable thing for researchers to do. For college students, though, this level of familiarity with the journal literature is not expected at all. Most professors just want their students to find quality sources and are not as concerned that the students find the key sources that have the highest citation counts.