Scholarly Metrics & Impact

Search for a topic via WOS/WOK and then sort the results by the number of citations each has received, to identify articles that have received the most attention to get a sense of the article's impact in the field. It can also help you identify researchers that have had an impact in a particular field. There are caveats: Recent papers that may be influential are likely to have low citation numbers due to being so new that they have yet to be cited. Finally, it is possible for a paper to be well cited for a glaring problem, or due to being influential historically, but now out of favor for one of many reasons.

Much like Web of Science, Google Scholar offers "cited by" counts, to show how well cited an article (or book) is. It has different access to citation information than Web of Science, so it's good to check both to see how many "cited bys" an article has in each, and to find the items that are unique to each system. Covers scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles. Google Scholar also offers Scholar Profiles - you can register your own and make sure all your publications are linked to you; you can also look up other researchers in this system.