Some information from an article in 4 August 2011 Nature, "Computing
giants launch free science metrics". If you don't have free access
to Web of Science and want to get data on citations for an author or
article, try the new free services from Google and Microsoft.
Overview: Google Scholar Citations
A Google Scholar Universal Gadget that enables users to search for
the total number of citations of author(s). It provides a total
citation count, total number of cited publications and Jorge E.
Hirsch's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number>H-Index.
http://code.google.com/p/citations-gadget/
If you put the name in quotation marks when searching on an author's
name, it will do a better job of restricting search to the desired
author, I've found. I think this program also includes books by the
author, which I don't think Web of Science does. I found that for my
own name, at least the numbers reported are:
Web of Science Google
# papers cited 62 54
# citations 2547 3181
H index 27 29
In a future feature users will be able to create a personal profile
showing all their articles in the Google Scholar database. You can
sign up to be notified when this feature is made available beyond the
current beta testers.
Microsoft Academic Search has some similar features to GSC, including
visualizations of citation networks (I'm linked to Paul Erdos by only
4 links, I discovered), but has indexed a much smaller amount of
literature than GSC.
David Inouye
