I chose to look at citations of Boris Eikhenbaum’s “How Gogol’s Overcoat Was Made,” as it is used in many courses and articles to talk about Gogol’s narrative technique of skaz, from the Russian verb skazat’ (to tell), which aims to form a written language that mirrors oral storytelling. Because the work was originally written in Russian, there were two instances of the work that appeared, “How Gogol’s Overcoat IS Made” and “How Gogol’s Overcoat WAS Made.” The first is translated incorrectly, as the verb “to make” is in the past tense in the original title; however, they still reference the same work, so I included them both in the citation search. Overall, the total number of citations was 16, across 6 articles, with the work being cited 1.23 times per year. The English translation of the work was first made available in the 1960s, so it was surprising to see a small amount of citations be returned, as I have seen it cited in a lot of articles; however, this could be due to the specific translations being cited and delineated as separate entities.

Unsurprisingly, everyone who cited the article was a Slavist. Boris Eikhenbaum was a prominent Russian Formalist, and this work is uniformly used to teach Gogol’s prose; moreover, when writing on Gogol, it is very common to discuss the mimetic, speech-like qualities of his works, which Eikhenbaum’s work foregrounds. When I performed the basic search to see all of Eikhenbaum’s works, I was a little confused, as when I did the citation search, many more of his works were returned. There might be some distinction I’m missing between the basic and citation search (are the citations related to works cited in works available on Web of Science, while the basic search returns works from Eikhenbaum that are actually available in the database?). The basic search returned 7 of Eikhenbaum’s works, with an H-index of 1, and average citation of 0.29 per item. I’m unsure which number would be better to report, as each doesn’t look very appealing for evaluations/tenure.

When working on this analysis, I saw that it can have utility for certain fields; however, for my field of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the transliterations of the authors’ names and translations of the works’ titles made it harder to narrow the search down, as one person could have many different names in the database. For example, I originally wanted to look at Yuri Lotman’s work in Russian Formalism; however, his name appeared as Iuri Lotman, Iurii Lotman, Juri Lotman, Yuri Lotman, etc., so finding a way to aggregate the citations was made a little more difficult. Overall, though, I think this is a useful tool for seeing when works are cited and by whom, and if I had looked at influential computer science articles from the U.S., a more streamlined search might have occurred.