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Citation Searching

For further assistance with citation searching, please contact the Liaison Librarian for your subject area.

What is citation searching?

Citation searching, also called cited reference searching, is a specialised type of research involving searching for articles, books, or other materials that have cited or referenced a particular work.

Why would Citation Searching be useful to you?

  • travel forward in time from a published work and view citations that reference back to an original source (article, book, conference presentation, patent)
  • understand impact of a work (journal article, conference paper, book) as indicated by subsequent citations by other scholars in the field
  • track development of a theory over the years
  • identify core researchers in a field

No single database covers all works that cite other works. You may need to search in several databases for a complete list of citations on the searched work.

Two core databases for citation searching are Web of Science (emphasis on Science fields) and Business Source Premier (business fields).

Instructions for other databases with Cited Reference Search Options are listed below.

Quick Introduction to Web of Science

Web of Science contains the citations from over 8,500 journals in all subjects, from 1985 to present. (The citation being searched may be older, i.e., pre-1985, but only references from 1985 or later will be retrieved.)

For more detailed searching assistance go to the Cited Reference Searching tutorial from Web of Science

Important Points to remember

  • The more details you know about the article or author will help you in narrowing your search ie. subject area of author or article.
  • It is also possible that only the first author of an article will be listed, so it can be important to know the order of the authors of a paper.
  • Use variations of author and title of work (or truncate first name with *, for example: Marsh, H*)

Web of Science is available via e-resources on the UWS Library homepage

  1. Click on Cited Reference Search button
  2. Enter data on the article by which you are searching
    Under Cited Author, enter author's last name and first initial*
    Under Cited Year, enter the year of publication (In most cases, you will not need to enter the Cited Work. Should you need to, click list of journal abbreviations and select the appropriate abbreviation.)
  3. Click on Search button
  4. Examine the results. The list displays the abbreviated journal title which may make it difficult to recognise the subject area.
  5. Select relevant references from the list of articles (or Select All)
  6. Click on Finish Search button.
  7. This will display a list of all papers which cite the article. Click on a title to view its full record. In the full record screen click Cited References to view those papers cited in the bibliography of the article. The Times Cited link shows the number of times the article has been cited, with a list of the citing papers.

How to save, print and email results?

You can mark a list of records on the results page or from within a full record. Submit your marked list using the panel on the right hand side of the screen on the results page. Use the Marked List icon to view a list of marked articles and choose to print, save, email these records, or export them to bibliographic management software such as EndNote.

How to set up a citation alert?

From within the full record of any article you can create a citation alert which will send you an email every time this article is cited in future. You will need to register to use this feature. Registration is free and can be done from the Web of Knowledge homepage.

Some UWS resources with the Cited Reference Search Option

This is not an absolute list and may change as the resources develop. Look for either a Cited Reference or Reference search option within a resource.



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