Researching "Forward" (also known as "Forwards Citation Chaining")
In most cases, journal articles will have a bibliography following the main body of the publication. This list of sources makes it relatively easy to locate materials cited by a study, and this form of research is often referred to as "backwards citation chaining" because it looks "back" to the studies published before the study you're reviewing. What can be far more difficult is to identify which authors have cited a specific article after it was published. This form of research is known as researching "forwards" or "forwards citation chaining."
At UD there are two tools you can use to research "forwards." They are:
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window
A citation database with multidisciplinary coverage in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Includes international proceedings coverage for over 120,000 conferences.
Web of Science allows you to plug in a citation and see who else has used that work in another paper. One of the major strengths of this database is in the cited reference searching.
To look up an individual article to see who has cited it since publication, enter the title of the publication in the search bar. You can also search by keyword to view multiple publications. Each entry will list the number of "Citations" and the number of "References." Citations refers to any forwards citations, while references is for any works that are cited within the publication (i.e. they were published before). Clicking on either of these numbers will retrieve the list of citations going forwards or backwards. Here's a screenshot with both links circled:
To do a cited reference search for a specific author, look by author’s LAST NAME and letters of FIRST NAME and MIDDLE NAME. NOTE: If you do not know the middle initial, use the asterisk *
To learn more about citation networks in Web of Science, please visit our guide on the topic.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Google Scholar search results include a "cited by" link at the end of each citation (see screenshot below). To view these citations, simply click on that link.
For full text of these articles in Google Scholar, remember to connect the database with University of Dayton Libraries and OhioLINK as explained in the video below.
