Introduction
Citation Analysis can give you valuable insight into the impact of a scholar's work. Citation counts measure the impact of a particular publicaton or an individual author by counting the number of times either has been cited in other works.
Web of Science vs. Google Scholar
When looking for citation counts, is it better to use Web of Science or Google Scholar?
Since each has its advantages and disadvantages, it's really a good idea to search both and compare the results. And you may also want to consult discipline-specific databases that offer citation data.
Anne-Wil Harzig, Professor of International Management at the University of Melbourne and creator of Publish or Perish software, offers a good analysis of the relative disadvantages of both Web of Science and Google Scholar in Google Scholar: A New Data Source for Citation Analysis.
Resources
This analysis of a particular author's work is one of the components used to evaluate the quality of that's individual's scholarly output and the impact he or she is having upon a particular discipline. Although such counting sounds relatively straightforward, it is complicated by the fact that there is no single citation analysis source that covers all publications and their cited references. The two primary sources for citation information are:
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Web of Science | Be aware that a citation search in Web of Science will only count citations from sources indexed by Web of Science and will not reference citations from books, dissertations or theses, patents, and technical reports not included in the database. This being the case, disciplines that publish heavily in the journal literature (such as the Sciences) are better represented here than those that do not (Business, for example).
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Google Scholar | Covers articles, theses, books, abstracts, court opinions and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research, and may include pre-prints and web-published reports as well as published literature. Since Google Scholar indexes information from multiple sources (provided by publishers, included in databases such as PubMed, found on the public web, etc.), there is no comprehensive list of which publications it covers. However, for many fields, the greater number of publication formats included means that Google Scholar may find citations that are not indexed in the Web of Science.
