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Conduct a Literature Review

A guide to walk you through the process of doing a literature review

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").

citation chaining

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:

Citation Chain 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.


View this sample article on Scopus

  • A - the "perfect" article found on Scopus
  • 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 under "Related documents".

Citation Chain PubMed


View this sample article on PubMed

  • A - the "perfect" article found on PubMed
  • 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 under "Similar articles".

Citation Chain Google Scholar


View this sample article on Google Scholar

  • A - the "perfect" article found on Google Scholar
  • C - find A's citing articles, the articles influenced by A
  • You can also find some related articles through "Related articles".
Other citation databases Some free platforms that offer citation info