Citation tracking is an important method to analyze the scientific impact of journal articles and can be done through Scopus (SC), Google Scholar (GS), or ISI web of knowledge (WOS). be traced more thoroughly. Key Words: Citation tracking, Google Scholar, Impact factor, Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences, Scopus, Web of Science Introduction Scientific literature quality evaluation is an interesting subject for researchers to find out the prominent journals of their field. Assessing the scientific productivity of researchers, scholarly influence of GW3965 HCl the journals, and individual works is done using different bibloimetric techniques. Citation analysis is one of the major biliometrics methods for quality evaluation of the journals by analyzing the citations of journals which includes counting the citations, considering the citing items, and comparing citations distribution in different scientific indexing databases (1, 2). Citation analysis information used to be provided only by Web of Science (WOS) from ISI as the strongest scientific indexing database for years but since 2004, Scopus (SC) from GW3965 HCl Elsevier and Google Scholar (GS) from Google became two major resources for retrieving citation information in addition to WOS (3). Due to several differences among the three mentioned sources GW3965 HCl regarding their coverage, accessibility, updating half life, etc; all the mentioned sources should be considered while analyzing the citations of individual journals (4, 5). Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences (IJBMS) is one of the leading Iranian journals in basic medical sciences which publish literature on anatomical sciences, biochemistry, genetics, immunology, microbiology, pathology, pharmacology, pharmaceutical sciences, and physiology. IJBMS is indexed GW3965 HCl in ISI, SC, and GS and in 2011 received its first impact factor of 0.324 which is fairly high. In the current study we aimed to examine the citation analysis of IJBMS in these three scientific resources (WOS, SC, and GS), and to compare the discrepancies between their citation frequencies, and distribution. Material and Methods We considered all IJBMS articles published in 2011 and 2012. Citations to each article were extracted from all scientific databases and considered separately. Citations referred to all articles indexed in WOS, Scopus, and Google Scholar were extracted from their official website (-) using cited by feature for each article. Coverage of databases, citation counts, and type of citing items were evaluated in each scientific database. The reasons of dissimilarity between IJBMS citation analyses of databases were evaluated in depth. Finally journals citing GW3965 HCl articles of IJBMS were analyzed according to their citation frequencies and 2011 Impact Factors (IF). All information was retrieved on 10/2/2013 from the corresponding websites of the three mentioned resources (WOS, SC, GS). Results Overall 157 articles were published in IJBMS during 2011 and 2012. All of these articles could be located using WOS, and SC (100% database coverage). On the other hand GS had 97% coverage (5 articles could not be located by GS). Totally, 37 articles were cited at least once in one of the studied databases (Table 1). Total number of citations was 20, 30, and 59 in WOS, SC, and GS respectively. Figure 1 shows the overlap and unique citations of each of the resources. Table 1 shows the details about citation analysis of IJBMS articles in the three WOS, GS, and SC. Table 2 shows the journals citing IJBMS articles in WOS and their Impact Factors (IF). Table 1 Details of the citations to Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences articles in Scopus, ISI web of science, and Google scholar Table 2 Journals citing Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences and their 2011 impact factor. The information was retrieved from ISI web of knowledge official website Discussion For years, ISI form Web of Knowledge was the only scientific database for retrieving citation analysis information. Scopus and Google Scholar are two major additions to the citation analysis which can be considered as WOS rivals. Unlike WOS and SC, GS is a Goat polyclonal to IgG (H+L)(HRPO) free extensive search engine. There is a considerable uncertainty regarding GS journal coverage, despite covering most of the journals and.