ENVI 130 | Introduction to Geosystems

Once you find a good scholarly journal article citation, you can use that citation to find additional information on your topic. 

You can search forward or backward using a citation.  

• Take advantage of the author's subject knowledge and knowledge of the literature;
• Focus on what the scholarly community deems useful--because it's been cited;
• Work best with scholarly journal articles.  They are not so great with patents, magazines, newspapers;
• Vary by discipline.  Some disciplines don't cite as heavily as others do.

Use a good scholarly journal article citation (like the one below--published in 1991), to forward citation search to find articles published after1991 that have cited this 1991 article.

Go to Google Scholar and type the first few words of your article title into the search box.   Your journal article title should come up as a result (but won't always).  You should see something like this:

This article has been cited 2,533 times since being published in 1991.  To view the titles that have cited this 1991 paper in their bibliographies, click on the Cited by 2533 link.

Backwards citation search by using the references or bibliography found at the end of an article. Reference lists--also called bibliographies--list information cited or used within the scholarly journal article. 

References or bibliographies provide sources of information related to your topic that are older than the publication date of your original article.