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Citation Products

This help topic contains overview information about the following products.

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InCites

InCites is a citation-based evaluation tool for academic and government administrators to analyze their institutional productivity and benchmark their output against peers and aspirational peers in a national or international context.

InCites reports and their metrics give you quantitative data to make sound judgments about:

Productivity
Specialization
Collaboration
Impact

Use InCites to answer such questions as:

Which papers are most influential in a given field of research?
Which authors are rising stars in their fields?
How many articles has my institution produced in the past five years? How does that output compare to that of peer institutions?
Has the research output of my country improved or declined in comparison with that of other countries?
Where are the researchers who collaborate with researchers at my institution?
Are researchers in my country performing better or worse than researchers in other countries publishing in the same journals?

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Journal Citation Reports

Journal Citation Reports^® is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 11,000 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 80 countries. It is the only source of citation data on journals, and includes virtually all areas of science, technology, and social sciences. Journal Citation Reports can show you the:

Most frequently cited journals in a field
Highest impact journals in a field
Largest journals in a field

Citation and article counts are important indicators of how frequently current researchers are using individual journals. By tabulating and aggregating citation and article counts, JCR offers a unique perspective for journal evaluation and comparison.

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Essential Science Indicators - Hot Papers

Papers generally reach their citation peak two, three, or four years after publication. A small group of papers, however, are recognized very soon after publication, reflected by rapid and significant numbers of citations. These papers are often key papers in their fields and are referred to as hot papers.

Time Period for Counts

We measure the age for hot papers in two-month periods rather than years, and we scan only those papers published in the last two years to see if they are receiving more citations than the norm. To get a current sampling of citations, we count citations from only the most recent two-month period.

Field and Age Variation

To correct for field variations in citation rate, each field is treated separately. Furthermore, since older papers tend to be cited more than newer (just published) papers, a separate analysis is made for each two-month grouping of papers giving a total of 12 groupings over the two year period.

Selection Criteria

A paper is selected as a hot paper if it meets a citation frequency threshold determined for its field and bi-monthly group. Citation frequency distributions are compiled for each field and cohort. Thresholds are set by finding the closest citation count that would select the top fraction of papers in each field and period. The fraction is set to retrieve about 0.1% of papers.

Types of Items Counted

Papers are defined as regular scientific articles, review articles, proceedings papers, and research notes. Letters to the editor, correction notices, and abstracts are not counted. Only papers from journals covered in Web of Science Core Collection are counted.

Journals Included

Counts are based on a journal set categorized into 22 broad fields. Fields are defined by a unique grouping of journals with no journal being assigned to more than one field. They include:

Agricultural Sciences
Biology & Biochemistry
Chemistry
Clinical Medicine
Computer Science
Economics & Business
Engineering
Environment/Ecology
Geosciences
Immunology
Materials Sciences
Mathematics
Microbiology
Molecular Biology & Genetics
Multidisciplinary
Neuroscience & Behavior
Pharmacology & Toxicology
Physics
Plant & Animal Science
Psychology/Psychiatry
Social Sciences, general
Space Science

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Essential Science Indicators - Highly Cited Papers

Generally, citations to papers peak in the second, third, or fourth year after publication, but some papers continue to be cited for many years. A few papers can exhibit delayed recognition. The patterns can vary greatly depending on the type of paper, the field, and the nature of the finding reported. Papers reporting discoveries, for example, can rise quickly and then fall as the discovery is further elaborated in other articles. Papers reporting methods or techniques can gradually increase in citation frequency over several years as the methods diffuse throughout the community and prove their utility.

Selecting Highly Cited Papers

Since citation rates vary by field and older papers are cited more than recent papers, the selection procedure for highly cited papers takes these factors into account. The first step is to count the number of papers cited at different levels of citation and construct distributions for each field and year. These distributions for each field/year are then used to set selection thresholds by taking the same fraction of papers.

Time Period for Counts

The time period for counts is 10 years, plus partial year counts for the current year (data is updated every two to four months). This means that any papers in the 10+ year period can be cited by any items in that same period. Citations from all sources are counted, and are cumulated from the year of publication through the current year. Database years (the actual years when items are entered into the database, which is not necessarily the publication year) are used to define the time periods.

Selection Criteria

Citation cutoffs specific to field and year are applied to all papers in the journal set to select highly cited papers. Citation thresholds are based on the distribution of citations, picking the specified top fraction of papers for each year and field. The thresholds are based on the cutoffs given in the All Years column of the Baseline Percentiles table.

Types of Items Counted

Journals Included

Counts are based on a journal set categorized into 22 broad fields. Fields are defined by a unique grouping of journals with no journal being assigned to more than one field. The Multidisciplinary field contains journals such as Science and Nature, which in an article level classification, would be assigned to specific fields. This should be taken into account when analyzing the field ranking of an individual scientist, institution, or country/territory.

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What is InCites?

What is Journal Citation Reports?

Journal Citation Reports is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 11,000 scholarly and technical journals.

What are Hot Papers?

Hot papers are papers that receive citations soon after publication relative to other papers of the same field and age.

What are Highly Cited Papers?

Highly cited papers are papers that continue to be cited for many years after publication.