Crawling Out of the Web: Alternative Citation Sources

Summary Citation analysis is a very valuable, extensively utilized technique that permits a researcher to study the literature of a scholarly discipline. Sophisticated commercial databases now allow the researcher to perform citation analysis much more easily than the earliest manual methods. As information technology has advanced in the Web environment, the number of vendors incorporating citation analysis capability into their products has increased. This proliferation bears scrutiny to highlight differences, advantages and disadvantages when evaluating competing products.