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You can think about research and scholarship as a conversation between scholars over time.

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If you examine one article you can find out what sources the author used to write it (the citations in their bibliography) and after it’s been published for awhile you can see what other author’s have cited the article in their work by looking at who it’s been cited by.  When we looked at Dr. Bushnell’s article in Science, we saw the references that they cited, and then we viewed who had cited him with the metrics and altmetrics.

Looking at the bibliography

Once you find a good article on your topic, you can then use that article to help you find more sources.  The reference list at the end of the article will list all sources. You can then look up those that seem interesting/relevant to your own research. In some databases this will be easy – there will be links.

In the image below, you can see where the list of cited articles for an article found in EbscoHost:

In other databases you may have to look up the book the author used (in IUCAT) or the journal article the author used.

See who has cited an article

It’s also helpful to see what other authors have cited an article. You can do this in Web of Science (easier for science or social science topics) or in Google Scholar.

In Web of Science you use the Cited References tab to search.

In Google Scholar, just search for the article and you will see a Cited by number.

Sources

Research 101: Scholarship is a conversation. Anna Eisen. May 12, 2014.

Scholarship as a Conversation by IU South Bend Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.