Activity: Experiment with 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.

Activity: Follow a Citation Trail

Citation trails allow you to:

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

Try following a citation trail for a written work using one of these resources:

  • Google Scholar includes a "cited by" link for many items on the results list
  • Web of Science is a multidisciplinary article database and citation index that is designed to search for and show citation impact. You have access to Web of Science 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.
  • The UW Libraries Search 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 Web of Science.

For more detailed directions on using citation trails see the Citation Trails page. 

Reflection 

  • What did you discover following a citation trail?
  • Are you seeing similar authors or articles appearing? 
  • How might you use a citation trail for your own research?

 

Next Up: