Research Process

The Web of Knowledge database allows you to track article citations, popularity of topics, major authors in a subject area, and much more. By tracking the amount of times an article has been cited by other scholars you are able to see which article has had the most impact on a particular field of research. These high impact articles are what you want to include in a literature review or an annotated bibliography. Looking at high impact articles will also allow you to discern the authors that consistently publish high impact articles (thus, major authors in the research field) and journals that consistently publish high impact articles (thus, major journals in the research field).

To access Web of Knowledge go to the A-Z Databases page of the Library.

For additional guidance, please see the following:

1. Search by your topic. In this case I will look for articles about Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
   
   
    
2. Sort your results by Times Cited on the search results page.
   
   
    
3. Now you can see how many times a particular article has been cited by other scholars in the field.