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Scholarly Communications

Citation Strategy in Practice

Introduction

Scholarly works cite other sources in order to reflect previous ideas and research and to give credit to authors of those works. This guide provides links to resources and tools to help support citation best practices for representation.

Citation Strategy Tools

These tools can help you audit your citations. To use them, your file of citations/references must be in BibTeX format (.bib) Citation managers like Zotero, EndNote, etc. can export citations as a .bib file. Other literature databases like Web of Science can as well. For those that don't have that option, like PubMed, you can export to citation manager style, import into your citation manager, and export as .bib.

If you have a manuscript with references that aren't in a citation manager, you can use this Citation Finder to scrape the references from your document and retrieve them in PubMed. You can import the PubMed references into your citation manager and then export as a .bib.

  • CleanBib
    • If you have your list of references in your citation manager (e.g. Zotero), you should be able to export them as a BibTex file and follow the instructions to run the code
    • If you want to analyze a past paper of yours, find the paper in Web of Science. Click on the link to the right for the References. Export these as a BibTeX file. NOTE as of 12/14, this method required a work-around to work in CleanBib. Please reach out and we will assist.
  • GCBI-alyzer
    • Search for probabilities of occurrences of first names, either across the globe or in a specific country.
  • Citation Transparency browser plugin

What about generative AI? Can it help?

Goyanes, de-Marcos, and Dominguez-Diaz (2024) offer a step-by-step research guide, with prompt examples and detailed clarifications, to automatically classify the gender from names through ChatGPT (as well as two partially tools). They refer to previous works noting ChatGPT's stability and performance with this task.

More Ways to Adopt Citation Best Practices

How can you find additional citations and be more representative of all scholarship? Consider these tips:

  • Examine your content, especially your Background and Introduction. Have you used the same citations for years? Are there others you could consider adding?
  • Have you conducted a fresh literature search to reveal different or additional publications?
    • Try literature databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, or Embase
      • From your results page, use the database features to sort or facet your results to reveal different publications (see below for tips)
  • What other practices are useful? Please share!

Revealing New Results

Many library databases have options to display your results differently. This can help highlight additional papers and provide a path to diversify your citations. Consider these tips:

1. Perform a search in a database below and use the tips to display your results.

Scopus

After performing your search, you can use the Analyze results to get a visual representation of your results:

From there, the "cards" display gives you options to see your results: click on the double-headed arrow at the top right of the card you are interested in:

 

Embase

After performing your search, use the menus at left to refine your results:

  • Click on the Sources option. Select only Embase references by clicking on the Embase circle then Apply. This will omit Medline/PubMed references (assuming you've already done a PubMed search). Note: Embase also includes Conference Abstracts - if you'd like to omit them you can use the Publication Types menu, or add NOT 'conference abstract'/it to your search string.


Web of Science

After performing your search, use the menus at left to refine your results.

  • Consider menus such as those for affiliation, country, and/or funder. Use the see all to see options for refining your search (or exporting results to analyze further.

 

2. After you've found additional citations, use the Tools above to audit those sources for author characteristics.