Research Guides: Cited reference searching: Home

Cited reference searching can aid in

Finding current publications on a topic
Seeking trends in a research field
Identifying top researchers in a discipline
Tracking the history of a research topic
Tracking your own or colleagues research

Databases can locate publications that cite a given work so you can trace how that work is cited after its publication. Cited reference searching will not work well for recently published works; allow authors time to cite a work after it is published.

Search results will depend greatly on the database you use; if an article cites a given publication, but the journal that article is published in is not indexed by your chosen database, then that citation will not appear in your search results. No database (including Google Scholar) will index every publication; thus no database will ever give you a complete list of works citing a specified publication.

Different publications will cite the same article differently; you will need to search variations of your author's name and publication title to ensure the best search results. Inconsistencies or outright errors in publication years, volume, and issues should be expected. For some articles, only the first listed author will be indexed. Search by the lead author for best results.

Cited reference searching works best for journal articles, though book citations are beginning to be tracked more often.

EBSCOhost databases
EBSCOhost databases (particularly the Complete databases that are large and contain lots of full-text articles) tracks citations to articles in a given database from articles in that same database. (This is a more limited list than other cited reference tools.) Start by finding your article. If there are citing publications in the EBSCOhost database, you will see a Times Cited in this Database link.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar tracks citations to the articles and other documents in its database. Start by finding your article (probably by searching the title). Then look for the Cited By link beneath the result.
HeinOnline
HeinOnline shows how often a law journal article has been cited by other articles in HeinOnline. Cited references available for articles from the 1950s onward.
IEEE Xplore
IEEE Xplore Digital Library displays cited references on a tab at the bottom of a citation screen.
PsycINFO
- This link opens in a new window
PsycNET from APA provides cited references of articles and book chapters from 2001 to present but can be as far back as 1926. Some books are also covered.
PubMed from NLM
PubMed/MEDLINE from the NLM offers a limited version of cited reference searching. PubMed records which are cited by articles in the PubMed Central database, can be found on the abstract page for a record. You can look for them on the right-hand side of the page, below the “Related citations in PubMed” section. The cited references link to the PubMed records, which in turn link to the full text articles since PubMed Central is an open access database

PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant Web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources.

PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A mobile version is available.
Reaxys
Reaxys will display cited references to other articles in Reaxys.
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect can search bibliographies of articles on that platform for cited references to an author or article.
SciFinder
In SciFinder, find an article in the database and look for Citings.
Scopus
Scopus will display for a given citation all sources tracked by Scopus that cite that source. It will also show a linked list of citations referenced in that source. You can set alerts for when a given article is cited by newer articles.
Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics
Web of Science has long been the primary tool for performing cited reference searches. If your article was published in one of the journals, conference proceedings, or books tracked in the database, you can find citing sources from these publications and many other publications not tracked by Web of Science

Cited reference searching

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