Raiders of the Lost ArXiv: Citation Searching in a Disciplinary Repository

"Librarians are often called upon to perform citation searches of faculty publications in order to support their promotion and tenure cases. The methods over the years have gone from using print indexes to online searching and from using one source, such as ISI's Science Citation Index (Web of Science), to multiple sources including Google Scholar and Scopus. Many subject databases such as MathSciNet from the American Mathematical Society (AMS) also now provide citation counts using the data available in their systems. In discussing with a faculty member in the mathematics department which system to search we decided to search as many as possible in order to leverage the strengths of each system. For example, ISI's system is still the most respected while Google Scholar is considered to include the most results. Though Google Scholar indexes the arXiv http://arxiv.org/ (2014), a preprint server for Physics and Math along with some related subject areas, we wondered if searching within arXiv itself would yield additional citations ..."