Creating Citation Reports

These steps demonstrate how to use Web of Science (WoS) to search for an author and generate a citation report to view metrics such as number of documents, times cited, and h-index. See the HSLS LibGuide on Measuring Research Impact to learn more about how these metrics are calculated and how to use them responsibly. 

On this page, you'll learn how to:

• Access Web of Science
• Search for an author profile to collect publications
• Refine and verify publications to include in a citation report

• Start at the HSLS homepage. 
  • If you have a Pitt username and password, click on the link for Web of Science under the Resources column. 
  • If you are a UPMC user, access Web of Science through the UPMC Health Sciences Digital Library. See our page on Remote Access for more information. 

From the landing page, select the Researchers tab.

Select Name Search from the dropdown menu to search by author name. The Author Identifiers option allows you to search by WoS ResearcherID or ORCID iD if known.

If there is only one author that matches your search, you will be brought directly to that author record. Otherwise, you will see a list of results to view. Review information such as affiliation, location, top journals, and recent publications to verify that you're selecting the correct author.

If there are multiple author records, they can be combined into one record. There are two options for this. After selecting the authors, click:

• Select View as combined record to temporarily combine the records for your current session, OR
• Select Merge Records to submit a formal request to permanently combine the records together. These requests are manually reviewed by WoS customer support and may take a few weeks to see changes take effect. However, if you are the author with multiple records, you may want to manage this yourself.

For now, select the View as combined record to merge publications from the records and click Claim my record on the following screen. You will then be able to verify the publications and control how your author record appears in WoS.

Metrics for the author are displayed in the Metrics section on the right. Before you take the h-index or other metrics, you should verify that the publications assigned to the author are correct and remove any document types that you might not need in the citation report. Click on the number of Publications in Web of Science in the Metrics section to get started.

There is a Document Types filter in the left column. Select the document types that you wish to remove (if any) and then click Exclude.

Now we can run the citation report and verify the publications from there. Scroll to the top of the page and click Citation Report.

If necessary, adjust the year range in the Publications section near the top.

Scroll below the graph to verify that the publications included in the report belong to the author. To remove publications, click on the minus icon to the left of the citation.

When finished, scroll back to the top of the page to view the author’s metrics, which may have changed after removing publications. Click Export Full Report to save the report as an Excel or Text file.

In case you need to save your citation report as a PDF file, the following instructions explain how to take your Excel file from the WoS export and convert it to a PDF using Excel.

1. Open the Excel file that you exported from WoS and notice how many columns there are. If you saved this file as a PDF right now, the data would likely not fit in the width of a page, or it would be too small to read. You'll have to do a little bit of data cleaning first.
2. Keep the following overview data that's located at the top of the report. This includes:
   1. Results Found
   2. Sum of the Times Cited
   3. Average Citations per Item
   4. h-index
3. There are many columns below the overview section that contain citation and times cited data for the articles included in the report. All columns EXCEPT the following can be removed to help fit everything within the PDF page margins:
   1. Title
   2. Authors
   3. Source title
   4. Publication date
   5. Publication year
   6. Volume
   7. Issue
   8. Beginning page
   1. Ending page
   10. DOI
   11. Total citations
4. This Excel spreadsheet shows how your citation report should look like before saving it as a PDF file. You might need to experiment with adjusting your column width and using Wrap Text on cells/columns to get everything to fit properly.
5. Select File > Print and select the follow settings. (Note: this might look different if you're using the Mac version of Excel.)
   1. Printer: Microsoft Print to PDF
   2. Landscape Orientation
   3. Fit Sheet on One Page
      
6. If your columns are still running over into the margins and not displaying properly in the PDF version, go back to your Excel file and try re-sizing the width of your columns and use the Wrap Text feature on different cells/columns.