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Using Citation Trails: About

Find related information sources by using an article's citation trails including bibliographies and cited by information.

Use Article Citation Trails to Find Resources for Your Research

Search Strategy

  • When you locate an article in a database that looks relevant to your research, look for links to Bibliographies or References. There may also be or Cited By, Times Cited, or Citation information.

Bibliographies or Cited References

  • A bibliography contains the cited references that the author(s) used when writing and researching the article.
  • Think of bibliographies as backward citation trails.

Cited By, Times Cited, or Citations

  • A Cited By page will list citations/reference that have since cited the article you found.
  • Think of Cited By lists as forward citation trails articles networks.

Why?

  • Follow the trail of citations from Bibliographies and Cited By lists to find a network of related articles.

Example

This is the citation trail information given for the article "Summer Dynamics of the Deep Chlorophyll Maximum in Lake Tahoe" indexed in the Web of Science database.  Not all databases provide this level of citation trail information.

citations trails screenshot from Web of Science

Using Citation Trails to Find MORE Resources

Use an article's citations trails to find more information related to your research. This video will show you how to locate an article's citation trails in Web of Science, Google Scholar, and UC Library Search. (3 min.)