You may want to try different methods when searching for relevant literature, especially if you are stuck seeing the same marginally useful articles over and over. For all three of these methods, you only need one really useful article to be able to open the door to a wealth of valuable literature connected via citations. The third method utilizes something called "controlled vocabulary" to harness descriptive language for your benefit. For this activity, choose one "adventure" you are not familiar with or would like to try out, and see if you can find at least one new paper useful to your research topic!
Some Options for Searches:
Looking at the works cited by an author is called backward citation searching. The author's bibliography gives you a snapshot of the thinking and research available at the time of publication. It tells you what ideas or theories have influenced the author.
It can also give you ideas for literature, authors, and journals to look into if you are stumped. All you need is one relevant article and its list of references!
For example, this image shows the backward citations for Sherman, Haidt, and Coan's (2009) article "Viewing cute images increases behavioral carefulness."
Also, pay attention to WHERE and HOW the author is citing a work in their article. A work cited while explaining conceptual underpinnings in the introduction might have a different link to the research from a work cited in the Discussion session section to refute or complicate a theory or body of work.
Steps for Backward Citation Searching:
1. Find a relevant article.
2. Read/skim, noting citations that related to your research. These citations may be in any part of the article.
2. Scroll down to the list of references at the end.
3. Find references you noted earlier.
4. Make a list of promising titles, authors, or publications to check out.
5. Find these titles, authors, or publications!
You can backward and forward citation search easily in Web of Science. Simply click on the number above "Citations" to search references that have been cited by the article and that are indexed in the database, or click on the number above "References" to find cited references that are also indexed in the database. If you are forward citation searching, it might be interesting to see if you can find different cited references in google scholar.
Finding out whether a work has been cited after its publication will help you assess the importance of that work and how it has shaped subsequent research and scholarship. This is called forward citation searching.
Forward citation searching can also give you ideas for literature, authors, and journals to look into if you are stumped. All you need is to find one relevant journal article in a database that allows forward citation searching.
For example, this image shows the forward citations for Sherman, Haidt, and Coan's (2009) article "Viewing cute images increases behavioral carefulness."
To use Google Scholar as a resource for citation searching:
The resulting list will include articles and websites that cite the original work as well as books scanned through the Google Books project.
If you have linked Google Scholar to Williams Libraries:
Subject Headings are terms that are most commonly used to describe the topic that a resource covers. Unlike keywords, which are user generated, subject headings are created and maintained by an authoritative institution. Since Williams Libraries organizes our resources using the Library of Congress Classification, we also utilize Library of Congress Subject Headings to provide access to our collections by subject.
Subject headings are arranged systematically, and can be useful tools to help browse the collection by topic. Subject headings for each resource are located in the "Details" section of the catalog record, under "Subjects."
1. Find an article in the library catalog
2. Click on the article to go to the catalog record.
3. Scroll down to the "Details" section of the record, and take a look at the listed subject terms. Unlike keywords which are user-generated, these subject terms are generated by subject specialists and catalogers, and offer a more controlled search of a specific concept.
4. Click on a subject to initiate a catalog search of that term. Alternatively, make note of the most relevant search terms, and combine them into a multi-pronged query.
TIP: Some subject headings may yield thousands of results, while some may only yield one or two. Pay attention to the specificity of a term, and add together multiple terms if they are yielding too many results.