Cross-references at a glance: references and citations in Pollux

September 23, 2025 10:26 AM

Pollux offers you the opportunity of loading information on cited sources for millions of articles from research journals. This allows you to quickly gain an overview of the research basis of selected publications. As a second option, Pollux offers you the possibility to display references to other research papers in which the selected article is cited. This helps you to quickly find thematically related, more recent research articles and to assess the reception of a publication. You can find an example here: ‘Direct Democracy in Europe: Potentials and Pitfalls’ (by Arndt Leininger, 2015).

The data is based on OpenAlex, a comprehensive, non-commercial database. Even though the data coverage is now surprisingly good, it is important to note that such citation data is never complete because for example the databases used do not cover certain types of media, such as books, or because they are biased towards English-language content. Citation frequencies can be an indicator of a publication's impact. However, relying solely on numerical measures for research evaluation should be viewed critically. The recommendations of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment are authoritative in this context.