What is a Citation Index? — Web Citation Index is a citation index of scholarly material, with special coverage in subject-based and institutional-based repositories. Within these repositories you will find technical reports, preprints, theses, white papers, and more.

Each year, thousands of documents are created by researchers in the sciences and social sciences. Most of them have lists of cited references — the authors' acknowledgments of debt to prior research.

A citation index is a compilation of all the cited references from published and unpublished documents during a particular year or group of years.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

Thomson Scientific 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 several pages will show you how to perform a Cited Reference Search and how to analyze the results of your search.