Skip to Main Content
Research Guides Databases A-Z Library Catalog Ask a Librarian Library Home Page SUNY New Paltz

Who's Citing Me? Searching for Cited References

This guide is designed to gather all the tools and resources available to New Paltz faculty when searching for cited references or citation counts for their publications. Useful when preparing for promotion and tenure.

Cited Reference Search Using Google Scholar

Google Scholar searches across many disciplines and sources, including articles, theses, books, online repositories, universities, web sites, etc.  There is no comprehensive list of what publications it covers. 

Before you start your search, it may be helpful to set your Google Scholar preferences to include links from our library.  To do this, select the Settings link under the gear icon on the top of the page.  From the Scholar Settings page, select Library Links and enter SUNY New Paltz.  Once this is set, search results will include the Find It at New Paltz link.  

How to Search Google Scholar

  1. Start at the Google Scholar homepage (scholar.google.com)
  2. Type in keywords from the title of your work and your last name.  Search. 
  3. Browse the results to find your work.  
  4. Look for the Cited by link below each result. This is the number of citations to this work that are indexed by Google Scholar. Click on that link to retrieve them.

Search example: Dr. Julie Bowker (http://psychology.buffalo.edu/about-us/faculty/bowker/)

Be Aware: 

  • Google Scholar includes citations from an array of sources in its cited by calculation, including PowerPoints, conference proceedings, and gives everything an equal rank.
  • Google Scholar is not sophisticated. It cannot remove self-citations and so you have to look for them yourself which can be time-consuming.
  • Google Scholar may include more than one version of articles, some of which may be preliminary, so there are likely to be duplicates which will inflate results. 

Google Scholar "My Citations"


Google Scholar released Google Scholar Citations in 2011.  It allows you to create a scholar profile from existing Google Scholar data.  It displays your publications and citations, and calculates your h-index and i10-index (i.e. number of articles with at least ten citations).    

To set up a profile: click on the My Citations tab and set up a profile. For details click here.  The service offers the option to automatically add new articles to your public or private profile. Once your profile is set up and you made it public, a Google Scholar search will display your profile at the top of the page. 


You can also keep track of your cited references in Google Scholar by setting up an alert with My Citations in Google Scholar.  The best way to do this is to search for the item(s) you want to track and once you've found a set of results you like, click the alert icon on the results page.  This will bring you to a screen that will look something like this:

Once you click create alert, Google Scholar will e-mail you every time it discovers a new citation to the article.   

Software & Programs for Google Scholar Citation Data

Here are some programs that you can try out that will help you manage the Google Scholar data.