Citation tracking, or citation analysis, is an important tool used to trace scholarly research, measure impact, and inform tenure and funding decisions. The impact of an article is evaluated by counting the number of times an article is cited in other authors' work. Researchers do citation analysis for several reasons:
The output from citation studies is often the only way that non-specialists in governments and funding agencies, or even those in different scientific disciplines, can judge the importance of a piece of scientific research.
It used to be that only the ISI Citation Indexes would list citing articles. That has changed, thanks to the linking abilites of the Web. Many databases will tell you that article X has been cited N times by articles in its database. Be aware that this number is based only on the articles indexed by that database; there may be other journals that cite your article that aren't listed in that database. Be sure to:
Consider the list below of databases that have a citation searching feature as starting place. Check to see if your favorite database offers this feature as well.