Research Guides: Searching the Scientific Literature: Citation Searching

Introduction

As part of the research process citation is made within current publications to earlier research. Citations may serve the following purposes:

Acknowledge related work of other scientists.
Identify additional sources of information.
Reference methods used in the research.
Acknowledge conflicts with other research results.
Provide support for views expressed in a paper.

Citations are commonly included within the text of the paper and listed in a concluding "Bibliography" or "Literature Cited" section. The average research paper contains eleven citations.

Starting with at least one initial research paper a bibliography of both older and newer research related to your topic can be created. The initial research paper(s) may come from several possible sources:

Subject searching of A-Z Databases and library catalog.
Your personal knowledge of the literature on a specific topic.
Reference books such as subject encyclopedias, treatises, and reviews.
Another person who has specific knowledge on the topic.

Finding Older References

To work BACKWARD in time use the "Bibliography" or "Literature Cited" section of publications you already in hand. Just look up appropriate references cited in these publications and then continue to follow up additional references that you find in older papers. Depending upon the extent of your information needs this process can be repeated until the point is reached when you continue finding the same older references.

Finding Newer References

A number of databases allow you to work FORWARD in time from an older reference. The results of your search in these databases will be a bibliography of more recent papers that have cited your original older research paper. See this short video introduction for more information: Advanced Research Skills: Citation Searching.

Google Scholar is the most comprehensive citation database to which the HSU Library has access.

Other scientific literature databases available at HSU also provide citations to more recent articles. You may also be able to set up a "search alert" for new articles that have cited an article found in a database. (Note: Two comprehensive citation databases--Web of Science and Scopus--are not available at HSU.)

ACM Digital Library
[ACM] The most comprehensive full text collection of articles and bibliographic records covering the fields of computing and information technology and covers the complete collection of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) publications.
Annual Reviews
Contains critical reviews written by leading scientists in 33 disciplines within the biological, medical, physical, and social sciences.
BioOne
Full text of publications in bioscience, environmental science and ecology research journals published by high-impact scientific societies.
BioOne Abstracts and Indexes
[ProQuest] Provides access to full text of publications in bioscience, environmental science and ecology research journals published by high-impact scientific societies. This version provides a full text searching feature.
CiteSeer
An evolving scientific literature digital library and search engine that has focused primarily on the literature in computer and information science.
CINAHL Plus with Full Text
[Ebsco] Full text publications in hundreds of nursing and allied health journals. Covers nursing, biomedicine, health sciences librarianship, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health & other allied health disciplines.
HighWire Press Network
Includes fulltext articles from over 1,000 scholarly journals, with almost 50% being freely available and with indexing back to volume one for most journals.
JSTOR
[JSTOR] JSTOR is a digital library founded in 1995. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals.
MathSciNet
Database of reviews, abstracts & bibliographic information for much of the mathematical sciences literature. Most of the items are classified according to the Mathematics Subject Classification. Authors are uniquely identified, enabling a search for publications by individual author rather than by name string.
Oxford Journals
[Oxford] Full text access to scholarly and authoritative journals published by the Oxford University Press, covering the arts, humanities, social sciences, medicine, and technology.
PsycINFO
[Ebsco] Produced by the American Psychological Association, PsycINFO is a comprehensive international database of psychology literature.
PubMed (Medline)
Comprehensive index to medical research, including nursing and public health.
ScienceDirect (Elsevier)
[Elsevier] Leading full-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,500 journals and almost 20,000 books. Set up a personal account to obtain special services such as table of contents mailings.
SciFinderⁿ
Research discovery tool that provides access to the world's literature in chemistry, biochemistry, and chemical engineering. As the most comprehensive resource for research in chemistry and chemistry-related fields, it also provides access to research from many related scientific disciplines, including biomedical sciences, materials science, agricultural science, and more. You will need to complete the registration process to access the database.
For information about access and use, visit our SciFinderⁿ Guide.