Q. What does "cited reference searching" mean?

A. To identify all the articles (and other documents, if possible) that reference a previously published document.

Q. Why is cited reference searching valuable to research? 

A. We can trace the scholarly conversation.  We can begin to learn which debates drive the conversation and which ideas concern the discipline.  We can identify influential articles and scholars.  We can discern how fields of scholarship developed, cohered, divided, and evolved over time. 

Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a large index of social sciences journal articles.  It covers over 2,000 social science journals and selectively includes articles from over 3,000 science and technical journals as relevant.

SSCI is highly valued as one of few citation indexes.  The citations of each article in SSCI are also indexed and cross-referenced.  You can use SSCI to trace citations of a given article, author, or topic over time.

1. Click on Cited Reference Search.

2. Look up the journal name from your citation in the journal abbreviation list.

3. Type in the citation information.  Be sure to abbreviate the author and journal correctly, or you will not get results.  Hit "search".

4. Check the boxes next to the author and work that match your citation. Some of the information may vary slightly (such as page numbers) but select each box that matches the author, work, year, and volume.  You can remove duplicated citations later. Hit "finish".

5. Now you have your citing articles. You can sort your results by "times cited" or refine further using the faceted terms on the left. Click the "times cited" of one of the citing articles to find even more articles that might interest you.  There are a lot of avenues for analysis within these results.

Google Scholar indexes scholarly material from many publishers and databases, as well as content from author websites.  You'll find scholarly articles, books, theses and dissertations, conference papers, and pamphlets.

1. Open the Advanced Scholar Search.

2. For an article:

• Fill in the title and change the drop-down box to read "where my words occur in the title of the article."
• Fill in the author, publication or abbreviation for the publication. You can fill in the date but often you find you don't need to do so unless you aren't getting results.

3. For a book:

• Fill in the title and change the drop-down box to read "where my words occur anywhere in the article."
• Fill in the author. Leave the publication box blank (this box is for journals, not for titles of books). You can also leave the date box blank for now.

4. Click on the "cited by" to see the citing articles, books, conference papers, and other content within Google Scholar.