Citation searching, or using the references cited by authors, not only leads researchers to other relevant articles on their subject of interest, it can also indicate the importance of a piece of research.
The importance and "impact" of scholarly research articles are often measured by
The library has access to several citation databases that have the capability of searching by cited references. Additional information on journal rankings and acceptance rates may be found on journal websites.
One of the best and most effective ways to conduct a literature review is to put the literature to work for you- once you have found an article that is perfectly on your topic (or is closely related, or cover's one aspect) you have in your hands the key to finding many more articles. How? By using the references cited in that article to discover more resources on your topic.
Below is a short video about using citations to find other documents:
Once you've found that perfect article, you don't just have to rely on the sources cited in that article- you can search to see if other scholars have cited your perfect article in their work. You can do this by using library databases (Proquest databases in particular often provide "cited by" information on the articles included in their databases), Web of Science, and Google Scholar. See the links below for more information on Web of Science and Google Scholar.
Be sure to check out Web of Science! It is the gold standard for doing this sort of work!
The Web of Science contains several databases:
-Web of Science Core Collection
-Biological Abstracts
-KCI-Korean Journal Database
-MEDLINE
-Preprint Citation Index
-ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Citation Index
-SciELO Citation Index
Switch from Basic Search to Cited Reference Search in Web of Science:
Then, select the results you would like to view and click on Finish Search:
The results list includes all the articles citing the author and work you searched:
Clicking on the title of the citing article will reveal more about the number of references the author cited, and how many times he or she has been cited:
Sarker cited 46 publications, including RR Caldwell. RR Caldwell's article shows it has been cited 1553 times.
Searching for studies that use a specific methodology
In the course of your research, you may want to find studies that utilize a particular methodology. Some databases (PsychINFO, for example) allow you to limit to a particular methodology in their Advanced Search options. In other databases, including ERIC and Education Source, the best way to find an article using a particular methodology is to add the methodology as a keyword to your search.
The example below is looking for studies about web based instruction that used qualitative research methods
ERIC Database Terms for Research Methodologies
These terms for various methodologies come from the thesaurus in the database.
Proquest Education Journals Terms for Research Methodologies
These terms for various methodologies come from the thesaurus in the database.