PSYC 252: Clinical Psychology: Citation Searching

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."

You can backward and forward citation search pretty easily within an article record in PsycInfo. Just click on the article and navigate to the "References" tab to look at literature cited IN the article, or the "Cited by" tab to look at literature CITING your article. 

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: 

1. Search for the title of the book or article. It can be helpful to put the title in quotes.
2. Choose the "Cited by" link.  

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:

• On the resulting list, use the Fulltext@Williams link (sometimes hidden under the double right arrows) to check whether we have the item in our collection.  Note: there may be more than one entry for your reference.