Citation Searching: Home

For detailed instructions on how to search within particular database interfaces, go to Citation Searching by Database Interface. Below is a list of Pace databases and free databases that offer citation searching.

Business/Economics

• ABI/Inform (ProQuest)
• Accounting & Tax (ProQuest)
• Asian Business & Reference (ProQuest)
• Banking Information Source (ProQuest)
• CBCA Complete (ProQuest)
• European Business (ProQuest)
• RePEc

Communications

• Communications and Mass Media Complete (EBSCO)

Computer Science

• ACM Digital Library
• ArXiv
• Computing (ProQuest)
• CiteSeerX

Education

• Career and Technical Education (ProQuest)
• Education Journals (ProQuest)

General/Interdisciplinary

• Academic Search Premier (EBSCO)
• Google Scholar
• Research Library (ProQuest)
• Sage Journals 

Humanities/Literature

• America: History and Life  (EBSCO)
• Historical Abstracts (EBSCO)
• International Index to Performing Arts  (ProQuest)
• JSTOR
• Religion (ProQuest)

Nursing and Medicine

• CINAHL (EBSCO)
• Family Health (ProQuest)
• Health & Medical Complete  (ProQuest) 
• Nursing & Allied Health Complete (ProQuest) 
• ProQuest Health Management

Psychology

• ProQuest Psychology
• PsycARTICLES (EBSCO)
• PsycINFO (EBSCO)

Science/Technology/Math

• ACS - American Chemical Society Journals
• ArXiv
• Biological Science Collection (ProQuest)
• Biology Journals (ProQuest)
• ChemXSeer
• INSPIRE
• Science Journals (ProQuest)

Social Science

• Social Science Journals (ProQuest)
• SSRN

A citation search is a search for other articles that have made reference to a particular book, article, or author. Suppose you have published an article in a scholarly journal. Many people have read this article and cited it in their own scholarship. A citation search will show you who has mentioned your article, where, and how many times.

A citation index provides bibliographic information to help you locate citing articles. It may or may not provide links to the full text of the citing articles.

Who uses citation searches, and why?

• Scholars who are hoping to be promoted—for example, professors seeking tenure. A citation count will show the tenure committee how influential the professor’s work is.

• Journal publishers assessing the impact of their publications. Journals with high “impact factors” are journals whose articles are regularly sought and cited by scholars. For more information about journal rankings and impact factors, see the Journal Rankings and Impact Factors tab.

• Those who are trying to trace the evolution of a scholarly idea or theory. When you find other works that have cited a particular work, you can see how the idea has been changed or added to over time.

No single citation search will be totally comprehensive. This is because no single database has access to all journals and publications. Therefore, any thorough citation search should always involve more than one citation search service. 

The two major interdisciplinary citation-searching databases are Web of Science, from Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson-Reuters), and Scopus, from Elsevier. Pace University does not currently offer access to either.

Web of Science is a citation analysis database of peer-reviewed literature owned by ThomsonISI and is composed of the following indexes:

• Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. It is the original and first citation research source and along with Google Scholar is considered to be the most comprehensive. 

It is important to remember that when Web of Science counts citations, it is only counting citations from a set of roughly 7,500 primarily English-language journals indexed by ThomsonISI. 

• Citation data from books, conference proceedings, dissertation & theses, patents and technical reports ARE NOT INCLUDED in this database.
• Science is much better covered in their journal literature rather than history and some subjects are not covered evenly by date.
•  Science journals are covered much farther back in time than are the journals in the arts, engineering, humanities, and social sciences. 
• Business and Education is poorly covered. Pace Library does not have access to this database. 

Scopus is a citation analysis database of peer-reviewed literature owned by Elsevier and covers the following disciplines:

• Science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities. 

When Scopus counts citations, it is only counting citations from articles indexed in the Scopus database.

It is important to remember that Scopus was only released in 2004 and citation tracking is only available for articles published between 1996 and the present.  

• Not considered especially strong in physics, astronomy, math, sociology, philosophy, theology, arts and literature. 
• Like Web of Science, citation data from books, conference proceedings, dissertation & theses, patents and technical reports are not included in this database. Pace Library does not have access to this database.