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Using Databases for Your Research

Comprehensive overviews of how to search in popular databases provided by UD. Especially useful for anyone relying on these platforms for long-term research projects.

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:

screenshot of where to click in web of science for citation chaining

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.


screenshot of cited references in google scholar screenshot

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. 

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