Public Policy & Administration

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:

• find out how much impact an article has had, by showing which other authors have cited the article in their own papers
• find out how much impact an author has had by looking at the frequency and number of his/her total citations
• discover more about the development of a field or topic (by reading the papers that cite a seminal work in that area)

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.