Ask a Librarian
What is Cited Reference Searching?
Cited reference searching lets you discover:
- Who has cited a specific article
- How many times it has been cited
- Related articles
- Citations of a specific author's articles (including yourself or one of your colleagues)
Try using a few different cited reference searching tools for better results. If you want to find out more about how these citation counts can assess researcher impact, see the Scholarly Commons Understanding Impact guide.
Resources
Databases like Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar offer large groups of journals and articles to search.
- Web of Science (Core Collection) This link opens in a new windowWeb of Science indexes core journal articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and other resources in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
- Scopus This link opens in a new windowScopus is the largest abstract and citation database including peer-reviewed titles from international publishers, Open Access journals, conference proceedings, trade publications and quality web sources. Subject coverage includes: Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics and Engineering; Life and Health Sciences; Social Sciences, Psychology and Economics; Biological, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
- Google ScholarGoogle Scholar collects academic articles, similarly to a library database. However, unlike a library database, Google Scholar uses proprietary algorithms to decide how to share certain resources, so we aren’t sure which research might be missing. Google Scholar also has fewer advanced search options than a library database. Google Scholar can be helpful to get background information, locate a difficult citation, or see a broad overview of what kind of research is being done on a topic.