Dana L. Roth has published an overview of the current alternatives. Services currently offering cited reference searching include (and I give the complete list to have a good look at it):
- Chemical Abstracts/SciFinder/SciFinder Scholar
- NASA Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service
- Amazon.com’s ‘Search Inside this Book’ program
- Scopus
- Scitation/Spin Web
- PROLA (Physical Review Online Archive)
- Citation Bridge (US Patents)
- US Patent and Trademark Office
- Google Scholar
- Optics InfoBase
- CiteSeer
- Science Direct
- PsycINFO
- IEEE Xplore
- Spires HEP
- IOP (Institute of Physics)
- CrossRef
She concludes her overview:
… Recent developments of ‘competitors’ to the WoS, while interesting and useful for quick links to some citing references, are clearly not a substitute for a comprehensive citation search. WoS currently indexes ~ 8000 journals from the sciences, engineering, social sciences and the humanities, and clearly remains the primary resource for citation searching….
Source: Dana L. Roth,The emergence of competitors to the Science CitationIndex and the Web of Science (pdf 6pp), Current Science Online, Vol. 89,No. 9, 10 November 2005,[http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/nov102005/1531.pdf]