Cited by & Related Articles
Barry Mauer and John Venecek
We discuss the following topics on this page:
We also provide the following activity:
Cited by (Citation chaining)
The process sometimes called “citation Chaining” helps you 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. This provides insight into who influenced them, what theories and methods they used, and how they developed their argument.
The next link in the chain is to see who has cited a work of scholarship after publication and what they’re saying about it. 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 was demoed in the video, but here’s an overview of how this feature works:
Search any article, book, or book chapter title in Google Scholar. When the result pops up, you’ll see the linked “Cited by” term like this:
Here we see that this article has been cited ten times. To access those ten articles, simply click on the link and you’ll be given access to those results:
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 based on your search criteria. These won’t be directly cited in your original article, they will be related or similar to it in some way. In this way, they’re more of a suggested reading list. This feature is located directly next to the Cited by link:
Just like the above example, click the link to be directed to a new page of suggested results. These won’t be direct citations, rather they’ll be suggestions that may or may not be relevant.
If you are using an offline version of this text, access the quiz for this section via the QR code.
