Citation Trails

Citations are an important part of the research process, as they not only credit external texts that have influenced new work, but create a trail that researchers can use to discover relevant, popular, and influential literature within a given area.

Using citations

A citation is used within a body of text when content that did not originate with you is used to support your writing. This includes words, thoughts or ideas, audio or visual materials and direct quotes. Other researchers may look to your publications to track what sources you have used. Likewise, tracking citation in other researchers works, or following a citation trail, allows you to start with one publication and find research that refers to it. The number of times a publication is cited by other researchers is one indication of the influence of that publication.

Citation trails allow you to:

  • find out how often a publication has been cited
  • find more publications relevant to the topic

Where to look

Google Scholar Links to an external site. includes a "cited by" link for many items on the results list.

A screenshot of Google Scholar showing how many times an article is cited.

 

Web of Science Links to an external site. and Scopus Links to an external site. are multidisciplinary article databases and citation indexes that are designed to search for and show citation impact. You have access to Web of Science and Scopus through UW Libraries. You will want to conduct a "Cited Reference Search" to follow the citation trail. In Web of Science you can see how many times an article was cited, and link to works that were cited within that article.

A screenshot of the Web of Science database showing a cited reference search.

 

The UW Libraries Search Links to an external site. also includes a function that helps you to find related materials by linking to citations related to a given article. You can access this feature as icons to "find sources citing this" and "find sources cited in this." Some articles have citation counts from Scopus and other from Web of Science.

You can watch a full tutorial on the Citation Trail function of UW Libraries Search.

screen shot showing the uw libraries search buttons "citing this" and "cited in this"

To learn more about Cited Reference Searching, see the Cited Reference Searching Guide.