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INFORMATION ABOUT CITATION INDEXES |
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| Use | Search | Usefulness |
A citation index lists papers cited alphabetically by author. The title of
the article appears under the author's name; beneath each article is a list of
those who have cited the author's work.
Citation indexes are useful tools for locating bibliography when we search
using:
- a specific article as a key to our research
- a much cited author's name
While searching the citation indexes you can use a specific article as if it were a subject term so as to retrieve more recent articles on the same topic. For example, you can find all works that make reference to an article published by Christopher R. Smit in 2000 in the Journal of Popular Culture. This type of searching often locates relevant articles that cannot be retrieved through traditional subject-author searching.
Researchers can use this tool to trace interconnections among authors citing papers on the same topic, and to determine the frequency
with which a specific work is cited, an indication of its importance in the literature of the field .
Searching citation indexes
Suppose that we have a relatively old article on the topic we are interested in and we want to locate
recently published papers about it.
We can then use a citation index to find that work under the name of the author followed by the names of the
authors who have cited it.
Options for searching citation indexes
"The main characteristic of a citation index is that while you only search by
author or by title, you can still retrieve articles relevant to your
topic. Nevertheless, the importance of these indexes is not limited to subject search. It also deals with the tracing of the history of a scientific idea,
the study of the exchange of information. It also expands to drawing conclusions
and gathering statistic data about the articles and their authors, as producers
of ideas and information. This is because the number of citations of a particular paper
reflects the value and importance of the ideas it contains.
The citation indexes also provide information about the relations between different sciences. The interaction of sciences is one of the
major characteristics of our time. If an article in one field of knowledge is often mentioned by experts in other fields, this shows that the ideas expressed in it,
may concern many other sciences. Citation indexes provide speedy recognition of the
common ground between different sciences and theories, which is impossible
to achieve in any other way, no matter what the quality of classification systems or the capacity of classifiers really is. In citation indexes,
scientists themselves ascertain the relation between different sciences by
making references to a specific article."
[ The text originally appears in Greek in the book by
Alkimini A. Skandali, I Epistimi tis Pliroforisis ke Tekmiriosis (Athina: I.G. Vasileiou, 1990) 69 ]