How to export secondary citations from Google Scholar or similar database??

August 4, 2010 11:14 AM

How can I extract a list of "second-generation" citations from Google Scholar search results, preferably in such a way that this information is easily parsable into lists of authors, titles, journals, and year published?

Is there any way to extract citation information from Google Scholar, ISI Indexes/Web of Science, or some other database able to search “forward” for references—that is, that can search for articles that have cited a particular article—and import that list of second-generation articles into either a spreadsheet or a reference manager such as Mendeley, Zotero, etc?

posted by samac to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Whoever is providing your access to Web of Science will be able to answer this question. I'm assuming that would be an academic librarian.

Both of these search products have "cited by" capabilities and Google Scholar has an option in "Scolar preferences" to include a button to export results to a number of reference managers.
posted by Gor-ella at 12:43 PM on August 4, 2010

Response by poster: Gor-ella, I'm familiar with Google Scholar's "export" feature; I was hoping that there would be some way of doing this in bulk, though. Also, it would be great if there could be some sort of "live feed" between Scholar and either Google Docs or a reference manager, so that new citations would automatically populate a spreadsheet or citation library.
posted by samac at 1:20 PM on August 4, 2010

I don't think Google does bulk, but a most products that cost money (ISI) do, they should also have an alert feature that can auto-populate or auto send and email of RSS of new hits.
posted by Gor-ella at 1:28 PM on August 4, 2010

Web of Science will do this easily, in a batch. Under each article, there is a Times Cited link. clicking that will bring up a list of all articles that have cited that article. At the bottom of the page, you can export that list. If you have access to ISI products, you probably have 24/7 chat access to an academic librarian who is familiar with WOS and can walk you through it. Or go to your local science library!
posted by rockindata at 4:00 PM on August 4, 2010

Web of Science will let you export records directly into a few citation managers (Endnote, Endnote Web, Reference Manager, and Procite). It's more of a two-step process if you're trying to get records into Mendeley, Zotero or one of the other cit. managers. Just save the records in Web of Science to a marked list, then save as a text file using the "Other Reference Software" option, then import your file into your program of choice. If you're importing records into a spreadsheet program, there's a tab-delimited save option in Web of Science.
posted by medeine at 5:15 PM on August 4, 2010