Web of Science® Contents | Index | Close Help
Cited Reference Variations

Every cited reference in the citation index contains enough information to uniquely identify the publication that the reference points to. Because only essential bibliographic information is captured, and because author names and source publication titles are unified as much as possible, the same reference cited in two different articles should appear the same way in the database. This unification is what makes possible the Times Cited number on the Full Record page.

However, not all references to the same publication can be unified. As a consequence, a cited reference may have variations in Web of Science.

For example, consider these variations of a reference to an article by A.J. Bard published in volume 374 of Nature:

BARD AJ    NATURE    1995     374     13     25     View Record
BARD AJ    NATURE    1995     13       374   2

The first one, which contains the correct bibliographic information, has a View Record link that takes you to the Full Record. The second reference contains a different volume number and it does not have a View Record link. Because a journal cannot have two different volume numbers in the same publication year, it is obvious that this is an incorrect reference to the same article.

The Times Cited number shown on the Full Record of this article is 25.

Information About ...