Importance of Citations and its uses

A citation is a reference to the source of information used in your research. Any time you directly quote, paraphrase, or summarize the essential elements of someone else's idea in your work, an in-text citation should follow. ... You do not have to cite your own ideas unless they have been published. A citation should be used when content that did not originate with you is used to support your writing. Content includes words (quotations, phrases, sayings, etc.) thoughts, or ideas (summarisations and paraphrases).

Citing or documenting the sources used in your research serves three purposes: It gives proper credit to the authors of the words or ideas that you incorporated into your paper. It allows those who are reading your work to locate your sources, in order to learn more about the ideas that you include in your paper. Impact factors should not be used as a standard of comparison between disciplines. Citation practice depends very much on the subject area, with the result that a high impact factor for one discipline may look extremely low in comparison with another.

Doesn't citing make my work seem less original?

Not at all. On the contrary, citing sources actually, helps your reader distinguish your ideas from those of your sources. This will actually emphasize the originality of your own work.

When do I need to cite?

Whenever you borrow words or ideas, you need to acknowledge their source. The following situations almost always require citation:

• whenever you use quotes
• whenever you paraphrase
• whenever you use an idea that someone else has already expressed
• whenever you make specific reference to the work of another
• whenever someone else's work has been critical in developing your own ideas.

Top Three Points to Remember

1. Citation counts are not a measure of quality as articles may be cited for both negative as well as positive reasons. Why something is being cited must always be considered in the assessment.
2. Citation behavior varies from subject area to subject area depending on many disparate factors such as the preferred document type (books vs journal articles vs conference papers vs patents), authors and audience (practitioners vs researchers), and environment (industry vs academic). Consequently, raw citation counts cannot be compared across subject areas, even for those subjects that may seem closely related.
3. Although many indexing or abstracting services provide citation counts, each source only counts what's in its own database, so citation counts will be different. Note that:
• Many services are counting the same sources (ex. all the well-known journals within the field). This duplication prevents a simple addition of scores across the services to get a total citation count. If you add counts obtained from different services, you must remove the duplicates in order to have a realistic total.
• As some services focus on the literature in one subject area (ex. PubMed databases covers health sciences) they are looking at fewer sources for citation data than the large multidisciplinary databases (ex. Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar). This can lead to the incorrect conclusion that searching these disciplinary databases is unnecessary. However, these disciplinary databases may pick up citations from specialized journals and non-journal literature for a given subject that are not included in the larger databases.

Best Uses:

• Finding out who is citing your publications and why. Have your publications proved beneficial to research outside of the expected subject areas and/or in unexpected ways?
• Comparing citation counts within the same, focused subject area or within the same journal; in each comparison the articles must have been published in the same timeframe.
• Some citation benchmark metrics may be used for comparisons across subject areas.