Guides & Tutorials: Conduct a Literature Review: Find More Related Articles

Find Related Articles through Citation Chaining

Once you have identified some key studies, you will probably want to find more similar studies. You can use citation chaining (also referred as Backward and Forward searching) to help you achieve this.

The diagram below illustrates how this works when you are trying to find similar articles of your "perfect" article ("A").

Research is constantly building upon others’ ideas and key findings are linked between papers through citations made by authors.

By tracing the development of your “perfect” article across time, you would be able to find articles ("B") that had an impact on this article and also the articles ("C") it influenced thereafter.

Where to Find Citing Articles?

It is easy to do backward searching - we just need to check the article's reference list. But how do we do forward searching and find the citing articles?

Many article databases offer citation information for the articles covered in the database. These databases are referred as citation databases. You can locate an article's citing articles by tracking terms such as "Cited by", "Times Cited", "Citing articles" or "Citing references".

Here are a few examples from commonly used citation databases:

Example on Web of Science

View this sample article on Web of Science

A - the "perfect" article found on Web of Science
B - find A's references, the articles that had an impact on A
C - find A's citing articles, the articles influenced by A
You can also find some related articles through "You may also like...".
For some articles, you can view the article's references in the context through "Enriched Cited References" feature, i.e. to view references by their location in the paper. References appearing in Results or Discussion may be more relevant to your topic.