What is a Citation Index?

Thousands of articles are published in research journals every year. Most of them have lists of cited references—the authors' acknowledgments of debt to prior research. The prior research may have been reported in journal articles, books, patents, or other types of material.

A citation index is a compilation of all the cited references from journal articles published during a particular year or group of years. In a citation index, you can look up a work that you know to find new material that has cited it.

Web of Science^® is made up of three citation indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded^®, Social Sciences Citation Index ^®, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index^®. ISI does not attempt to capture the complete bibliographic information for each cited item. Rather, an abbreviated citation is captured, which provides enough information for you to be able to locate the item.

The next page illustrates how a bibliography may appear in Web of Science.