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 coverage in the physical and social sciences. Contains 150 million records.
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
A freely accessible search engine providing scholarly articles, theses, books, and conference papers across various disciplines, facilitating academic research and citation tracking.
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.
