Cited Reference Searching

In researching a topic it is often very useful to find articles that have cited an article of particular interest. There are two library databases with good support for this cited reference searching: Web of Knowledge (aka Web of Science) and Scopus. Taking an example:

Mouzas, S., Henneberg, S., and Naude, P. (2007) Trust and reliance in business relationships. European Journal of Marketing, 41 (9-10), 1016-1032.

Web of Knowledge – (click to expand)

Web of Knowledge  (Web of Science) shows that this article has been cited by 12 articles that are themselves covered by Web of Science.

It also offers the chance to look for related articles – those that are similar to this one because of the references they share.

These features can be used to trace the development of research ideas through shared references and reference chains: paperA cited_by paperB cited_by paperC cited_by …

Note: Web of Knowledge  does not give direct access to full-text but these are mostly easily reachable through the purple FindIt@UML links.

Scopus (click to expand)

Scopus shows that this article has been cited by 17 articles that are covered by Scopus. The details are in the Cited by since 1996 section on the right hand side.

Scopus will often provide a greater number of cited-by articles  since it  covers a greater range of business and managenent journals. See  Journal database comparison

Like Web of Knowledge, Scopus also offers links to related documents based on the references they share and access to full text through  the purple FindIt@UML links. Both databases  also offer the chance to setup an alert when a particular article is cited by another in the database.

Google scholar will give an even greater number of cited by resources – 39 for this example. This is because Google scholar will include everything where it can find the full text or bibliometric information on the web – articles, books, conference papers, working papers, reports, theses. In contrast Web of Knowledge  and Scopus only include cited by from respected academic publications that qualify for inclusion in the respective database.

Finally I must acknowledge Dave Hirst’s post on the Everything Engineering blog that partly inspired this one – How to track the citations? Web of Science versus Google Scholar.