An article’s citation tells readers the number of times an article was referenced in other publications. The more citations an article receives, the more respected it is considered to be in the scientific community.

There are dozens of citation metrics that could be tracked, however, no single source exists that provides all the necessary information. Because of this, scientists often turn to Web of Science for help. The purpose of this article is to introduce you to a powerful, yet easy-to-use tool that will allow you to discover the most cited articles in your field in seconds.

Why Should You Track Citations?

Tracking citations is critical for any scientist or academic who values the work they do. Being able to identify the most highly cited articles will give you a better sense of the importance of your work and allow you to become more competitive for grants and academic positions. It also helps identify areas of research that are especially fruitful and may even lead to a Nobel Prize.

There are many benefits to tracking citations, but perhaps the most valuable one is that it allows you to find out which articles are gaining the most attention from your peers. This can help you determine the most interesting areas of study for your research and find new ideas and perspectives that you may not have considered before. For example, figuring out that a particular paper was cited thousands of times may indicate that this is an area of research that is currently gaining a lot of popularity. Finding out what are the most cited articles in your field can help determine what is trendy and what is not. You can then use this information to guide your research and writing process to produce high-quality, interesting work that will gain a lot of attention and be highly likely to be cited.

How To Find The Most Cited Articles In Your Field Using Web of Science

To find the most cited articles in your field, you need to begin by inputting the essential details about your paper into the Web of Science search engine: title, abstract, author, publisher, and year of publication. You should also set the country and language to ‘English’ and ‘article’ (without the quotation marks), respectively.

After you enter these details, you will be presented with a list of possible papers to choose from. Since you are interested in articles in your field, you will want to filter the list to include only those that are relevant to your topic. You can do this by clicking on ‘Advanced Search’ and using the category tree on the right to navigate to the topics that you are interested in (Figure 1). Once you have found the right category, you can narrow the list of possible articles by using the ‘filter’ box at the top of the page. You can also use the ‘cited by’ box to find papers that were particularly influential on your topic. This way, you will be able to see the papers that were most cited by others in your field. You can find more information about each paper by clicking on its listing (Figure 2).

Articles That Are Cited The Most

Once you have found the list of possible articles that you want to read, you need to set the publication date to ‘Current Date’. This will help you find articles that were published in recent months. You can also use the search bar to look for papers that were published in the last year. Setting the publication year this way will also limit the list of possible articles to those that were published within the last year. You will need to do the same with the month filter to be able to compare apples to apples.

By default, the list will include all the articles matching your criteria. You can then sort this list by clicking on the column headers to highlight the most relevant articles (Figure 3). When you find an interesting article that you want to read, you can click on its listing to open it in a new tab or window. This way, you can continue researching without getting distracted by the information overload that comes with a myriad of websites.

For academic articles, you will need to click on ‘article in a journal’ to see the actual article. This will give you a peek at how the article was presented at the time of publication, including figures and tables. While it is useful to see how other academics evaluated the article, you should try to read the paper for yourself and get a sense of what the author was trying to say. If there is no figure legend or table provided, it usually means there are no original data to be found. In this case, simply take this as a sign that the reviewers did not find the article very interesting and try to find a newer, more updated version of the same study.

Top 10 Articles

To discover the top 10 articles in your field, you will need to input the search criteria (title, authors, and year) similar to how you found the most cited articles. Once you have done that, you will be presented with a list of the most influential articles in your field. You can then sort this list by clicking on the column headers to see the most relevant articles at the top. When you find an interesting article that you want to read, you can click on its listing to open it in a new tab or window. This way, you can continue researching without getting distracted by the information overload that comes with a myriad of websites.

While it is critical to learn from the best, it is not always advantageous to read these articles. Knowing which ones to avoid and which ones to focus on will help put you in the right direction so you can produce the highest quality work possible while still abiding by the rules and regulations that have been set in place by the scientific community. The key to becoming a successful researcher is to find a way to integrate new techniques and methods while still being able to draw on the wealth of knowledge that you have accumulated throughout your life.