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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 in Books and Book Chapters

A number of disciplines, especially in the Social Sciences and the Arts & Humanities publish their research in books. These disciplines are not that well served by traditional tools that primarily focus on journal literature.

Listed below are a few strategies to gauging the scholarly impact of books and discovering cited references in books, while they are not perfect or comprehensive, they can help you collect some relevant data.

  • Google Scholar: Google Scholar’s strength lies in the fact that it indexes books and book chapters.
     
  •  Ebook Central (Formerly Ebrary): Offers full text searching of over 80,000 ebooks from academic publishers. 
     
  • Amazon: Select books, and use the Look Inside function.
     
  • WorldCat: WorldCat is a catalog that reflects the holdings of libraries around the world. It contains records for the following types of materials: books, journals, musical scores, computer data files, magazines, newspapers, computer programs, manuscripts, sound recordings, films and slides, maps, and videotapes. To assess the scholarly impact of your books, search each title in WorldCat and in each relevant record, check the Libraries Worldwide field. It will tell you how many Libraries own that item and also provide the names of the Libraries.

Also, some discipline-specific databases such as PsycINFO that also index books and book chapters will provide times cited information for books and chapters cited by other items indexed within those databases.

For help in using the resources highlighted in this guide, please request a research consultation with a reference librarian to discuss your specific needs.