Research Hack: Citation Searching

As graduate students, you specialize in your field of study. As you learn the lingo of the profession, the names of influential people and theories, and get familiar with popular academic journals in the field, you begin to conduct more informed searches. Citation searching is a shortcut to all this hard-earned knowledge. Using this research technique, you can easily find related resources which you can use to strengthen your reference pool and also gain insight into the field - a holistic view that you can't get when cherry picking individual resources from a results list.

Citation Searching: Look backward at the references list of a resource. Look forward to see if this resource appears on other references lists.

Two essential tools: Journal Finder and Powersearch

Journal Finder helps you locate the academic/scholarly journals you have access to as a LR student, as well as other periodical publications, like newspapers and magazines.*

Powersearch lets you search multiple databases at once - use the "choose databases by subject" link above the search bar to customize your search.

Using a particularly good resource, like your text book, an assigned reading article, or other source you have found:

Look backward - at the reference list. 

Even a cursory examination of the resources cited in an article or book can:

• lead you to other resources that discuss this topic.
• give you a snapshot of the predominant thinking and the research available at the time of publication.
• reveal what ideas or theories have influenced a researcher.

Think of the References or Works Cited section as a recommended reading list - skim the article titles and seek out any likely looking ones, and/or skim the journal titles and try searching for more articles on that topic in that journal - using the Journal Finder; notice the authors and search for more of their work - using Powersearch.

Look forward - find out if other researchers have cited this resource since its publication. 

• looking forward gives you insight into the impact of the resource on the scholarly landscape - how it has (or has not) shaped subsequent research and scholarship.
• it is particularly helpful in literature review assignments.

Quotes Picture by Dennis Bayeng

Looking forward is not as readily doable as looking backward. For one, if it's a brand new article, you'll just have to wait and see. For another, sometimes you need access to a citation tracker tool (such as Web of Science or Scopus -- Lenoir-Rhyne does not provide access to these) in order to get this information. Google Scholar (Google's free academic database) puts citation tracking into their search results - look for the "cited by" link in the results page - however, it is limited in scope. At the very least, some databases offer a "times cited" count, which can tell you if anyone else found this article useful.

For citation searching to work,  references must be cited correctly. 

Join us April 9th at 10am for a workshop on using APA format so you can cite your sources like a pro!

Email Sarah Reeves at sarah.reeves@lr.edu to register for this workshop.