Citation Searching

Scholarship is a conversation, and citations are the thread of that conversation. Learning how to follow citations will help you track down those hard-to-find resources and broaden your search strategy for very current or very specific topics.

Forward Citation Searching with Google Scholar

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.

Google Scholar search results for Marlene Sandstrom search with the cited by link highlighted

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.