Chapter Eight: Using Google Scholar
Advanced Tip: Citation Chaining
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Citation chaining is a process through which you can track the development of a topic backward and forward in time. For example, it is common to “mine the bibliography” of an article to see who the author(s) cited during their research. The reverse of this process is to track the activity around a work of scholarship after publication. How often has it been cited? Who has cited it? What are other researchers saying about it? Google Scholar and Web of Science are the two resources that offer this feature.
This strategy is useful when you’ve found one or two articles that you want to use in your paper. You can then expand the scope of those resources by mining their bibliographies to see who they cited, then go to Google scholar to see who cited them. Citation chaining can also give you some insight into where those authors fit within the scholarly conversation on their topics.
Related Articles
Similar to the above, the related articles link will retrieve a set of results that may be relevant based on your search criteria. Watch this short video for more information about finding sources from citations:
