Using Citation Trails

Welcome! Here we'll discuss citation trails: what they are, how to locate them, and how to use them to improve your research. Sometimes the act of following a citation trail is called "citation chaining" or "citation mining."

Outcomes

After reading this guide and doing the included activity, you should:

• Define what a citation trail is,
• Distinguish between forward and backward citation trails are, and
• Use citation trails to find additional resources for your research.

A citation trail is a link from an article or book to a second article or book, connected in some way to the first article. If you find an article that is important or relevant to your work, you should follow the citation trails to find similarly important or relevant articles.
 

• A forward citation trail links from the first article to subsequent articles that use information from the first article and cite the first article in a bibliography or list of references. These are usually listed in a database record under "citations."
  
   
• A backward citation trail links from an article to articles that were used as resources in the first article. These are usually listed in a database record under "references."
  
   

The number of citations an article gets may indicate the relative importance of that article in the field or discipline. Generally, the higher the list of citations, the more that article has been used as a resource for subsequent research, which would suggest that the article's research and conclusions are sound. However, if an article is very recently published (within the last two or three years), it may not have many citations regardless of its value. 

Note: High citation counts are only a proxy for quality. You still need to read and make your own evaluation of the article's credibility and trustworthiness.