Q. How do I do a cited reference search? What are cited references?

A cited reference search allows you to identify publications that have used (cited) an article you're interested in. It can be a good way to find related bibliography when you've found a useful article. It also enables you to see how much an article has been read--if it's been cited a lot, it's said that it has a high "impact factor." But it might be cited a lot because it was wrong: you have to find and read the citing articles to determine how it was used.

We have two main ways of finding cited references.

One is Web of Science (which is not just journals in the sciences--also plenty of humanities and social sciences journals). Choose Cited References from the Web of Science search screen and follow examples for how to structure your search. (Web of Science only provides articles in publications that are in the Web of Science database, not all publications.)

Another is Google Scholar. When you find an article in Google Scholar, you'll see underneath it "Cited by" and a number. That will take you to articles or other materials like book chapters that cited the article you found.

Google Scholar and Web of Science will give you different results because Google Scholar will find more results, but Google Scholar has many duplicates, non-scholarly sources, and sometimes errors. Google Scholar "cited by" is a good way to find bibliography related to an article, but not a good way to measure an article's impact.