PSY 193H (Hahn-Holbrook)

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. 

• When you locate an article in a database that looks like it might be useful to your research, look in the article for a link to a bibliography of materials used in the writing of the article. This bibliography may be called References, Works Cited, Cited References, or something similar.
  • Not all databases include links to bibliographies. If no such link exists, bibliographies can usually be found at the end of the article.
  • Bibliographies contain the cited references that the author/s used when researching and writing the article. Think of them as backwards citation trails.
     
• Articles in a database may also include a bibliography of all the articles that have cited the article you found. These may be called Citations, Cited By lists, or something similar. Think of these as forward citation trails.