These resources are free and can be used by anyone, anywhere.
Google Scholar: easy and fast set up, this allows you to track your publications and see your citation record and impact factor.
Microsoft Academic : also east and fast set up, similar to Google Scholar, but more sophisticated.
Publish Or Perish: This is software that works off GoogleScholar and Microsoft Academic that can help analyze your citations and create tables, charts, etc. This is aimed at professors going up for tenure and promotion. It is updated annually and over a decade old.
Research Gate: this is very easy to use and similar to Microsoft Academic. You create an account and log your work (it will give you suggestions as to what it thinks your published as well). This acts more like a community - so you see citations, etc. but can also leave comments for others and request access to their work.
If you know your article is in X database, you can also go to that database and look at the “Cited by” link below the title/abstract in the record page of your article. Here are steps to 1) Make sure you are looking at the right author and 2) Determine if an article has been cited. These steps may vary slightly depending on the database, for instance JSTOR's interface looks different, but the same process can be completed in any database.
Here's how (bold = steps):
Make sure it's the correct author:
Select a database from the list, like Academic Search Complete. Do a search for the article title or author that you are looking for. Example: search for the author Griffin Trotter. Go to Advanced Search. Select "search by author" then type in "Trotter, Griffin".
The databases will bring back the author name as they are cited - make sure you are using the correct name (maiden?, hypen?, etc.) and that the last name is first. You may need to also search for Trotter, G. and see if any results are also Griffin Trotter.
Searching for Trotter, Griffin brings back 25 results. If you search Griffin Trotter, you get 1 result. Trotter, G. gets 6 results.
Looking at the Trotter, Griffin results, click on the first article. Then click on the author's name (highlighted below).
By clicking on their name, this makes sure that you are looking only at the articles linked to that exact author, even if they have the same name as somebody else.
Has this been cited?
You can see if the article has been cited by others in two places. One is in the result list, the second is in the item record itself. Below are examples of both. The top image is in the result list, the second image is the item record.
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You can see that this article was cited 9 times and is cited once in this database (Academic Search Complete). In the top image, this information is above the PDF file and below the subjects. In the bottom image, this information is in the left hand column below the PDF.
When you click on "Cited References (9)" you get taken to a page that shows the citations.
