Welcome to our tutorial on citation searching

Citation searching is a method of unstructured searching that will help you find articles that have either cited or been cited by a relevant and reliable article you have already found. In this video, we will briefly consider the benefits of citation searching before then looking at a few different ways you can use the method during your own research.

As citation searching allows you to follow research leads both forwards and backwards in time, it is sometimes called ‘backward’ and ‘forward searching’. It can be a great way to take advantage of the research others in your area have already done.

As we can see on this slide, once we have found an article that is relevant to our topic and we are using in our work, for example, this paper written in 2005, traditional citation searching involved looking backwards through the articles that had been cited in our article. This is often a really effective way of finding foundational theories or ideas within the field that later research has built on. We would generally do this backward searching by looking through the article’s bibliography or reference list.

However, using modern citation tools, we can now also look forwards to see more recent articles that have cited our article in their work. This allows us to see how arguments and ideas within our original article have either been supported or disputed in more recent research. For example, in these two papers from 2015 and 2023. This can be particularly useful if we want to understand the broader academic discussion going on around the research we have already found, and how research in the area has progressed.

Citation searching can also help identify the seminal research that has been carried out on a particular subject. For example, if a journal article has been cited many times, this might suggest that this piece of research could be particularly important in its field.

However, the citation count doesn’t always tell us about the article’s quality. For example, a piece of high quality research may be in a very small field and therefore may not attract as many citations, despite its quality. And on the other hand, a highly-cited article may have attracted multiple citations because of its controversial nature, which has provoked a lot of disagreement from other academics.

So just remember that while citation counts can be a useful guide, you still need to properly evaluate any research you intend to include in your own work.

How to citation search using Library Search

Now we know what citation searching is and why it will be useful in our research. Let’s have a look at how we can start using the method in our work. We’ll start by looking at the Library Search here at the University of Sussex.

So, if we navigate over to the library’s home page and scroll down to Library Search. And for today’s video, we’ll imagine that I’m searching around the topic of gentrification and its effect on working class communities in London.

After carrying out a search around this topic, we can see our list of results within Library Search. Immediately, the top article looks relevant to our topic, and if we now imagine that after reading through the article, it’s a piece of research we are definitely going to go ahead and use in our own work. Then how might we go about citation searching this article?

Our first clue is these two red icons that appear next to the article title. These indicate that Library Search contains information on both works cited within this article, and work that has since cited the article. To access this information, simply click into the item. And scroll down to the ‘Citations’ section.

Here we can either look backwards by selecting ‘cited in this’ with the down arrow, which will give us a list of items cited within this piece of work. This is essentially like looking at the article’s bibliography. As mentioned before, this can be a great way of finding the ideas and theories our paper has been engaging with.

But what’s really interesting is if we return to our item’s main page, we can then use the ‘citing this’ option with the up arrows to look forward to a list of articles that have cited our article. So we can see here results, all of which were published more recently than 2020 and some of which, like this seventh result, which looked potentially extremely useful to our topic.

This forward citation searching feature provides a great way of seeing how the ideas in our original article have either been built on, or challenged by other writers in the field. It’s also worth pointing out that if we wanted, we could continue our forward citation searching journey by using the same feature on the results we have in front of us. And in this way, we could quite quickly and easily build up a network of papers that are interacting with one another around a topic we are interested in.

Journal landing page

While library search is a convenient and effective way of citation searching, when you are carrying out your searches within this database, it’s worth noting that there are other places that provide citation information, which can often offer more up-to-date and comprehensive lists than Library Search is able to.

The first of these we’ll look at is the journal landing page of the article itself. So, with our example, if we go back to the main item page and access the article in the usual way. We will be taken to the journal page, in this case The Sociological Review, where we can read or download the article we’re interested in. This page is normally a great place to find citation information for the article.

So, when it comes to backward searching, we will simply need to navigate to the article’s bibliography or reference list, which normally appears at the bottom of the article. So, we can see here all of the references that have been cited within the original article. But where exactly on the page you will find the information for forward citations will depend on the particular platform you find yourself in. Often it will appear on the right hand side in a ‘Cited By’ list, but in our example we are going to find it within the ‘Metrics and Citations’ section.

So, if we scroll down to ‘Articles citing this one’, we get two options to see citing articles: Web of Science and Crossref. You can use either of these lists, and you will notice that Crossref has been able to find more forward citations than the 14 that Library Search found. From here, you can continue your citation journey by simply clicking on ‘Go to citation’ on any articles that sound interesting and useful for your topic.

Web of Science

Another option is to go directly to a large multi-disciplinary citation database like Web of Science, Scopus, or Google Scholar. These databases should all give a fuller list of forward citations than Library Search. Let’s have a look at how we would navigate to Web of Science to carry out a forward citation search.

So, if you head to the Library’s A-Z of databases, we can then either search for Web of Science in the search bar, or we can select ‘W’, and then find Web of Science from the list of databases.

This will this will take us to the Web of Science homepage. From here we can enter the name of the article we are interested in, hit search and hopefully see our result pop up on the next page.

We can now see both the backward citations labelled ‘References’ here and the forward citations. Once we click into this, we will get a list of the forward citations, which we can now browse through.

One of the benefits of accessing Web of Science from the library’s A-Z database in the way we just did, is that the database will now recognise you as a member of the university, and you can see it’s giving us the option to find these resources using the journal subscriptions Sussex has access to.

As well as getting a full list of citations, these larger databases also give us the option to search within our results, which can be useful when we have found a large number of citations. For example, if I wanted to know which of these results had also mentioned ‘regeneration’ in the title or abstract, I can enter this term in the search bar on the left. And see that five of our results are also talking about regeneration.

So, let’s imagine I now want to access this article. We would want to go to the ‘Find it at Sussex’ button and click there. And then access the article in the normal way via the Library Search.

That’s all for this tutorial, thanks for watching. Happy citation searching.