Library Help

​Citation information can be very helpful in finding other papers that build on a piece of research, or determining how a paper has been received. You can use citation databases to trace an idea through the scholarly literature.

You can get citation data for individual papers through Scopus or Web of Science. These databases allow you to see overall citation numbers as well as trace all the subsequent papers that cite it, or go backwards to find earlier papers. 

Journal Citation Reports or Scopus Journal Metrics can be used to find overall citation statistics for a whole journal, but it is important to remember that there are limits to how useful this is – lots of heavily cited papers are in journals with low average citations, and vice versa.

For more information on interpreting citations, see our guidance on bibliometrics.