A key research strategy that most people learn early on is to look at the references of an article you have already found. The idea is that if you find this article useful, then you might find one, or more, of the articles in the reference section useful as well. This strategy allows you to look backwards in time to find similar articles.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to apply the same strategy, but in reverse? In other words, you would find articles published in the future that cite the article you have in your hand. As a matter of fact, you can. There are several tools that allow you to do this. For example, in PubMed, simply scroll down to the bottom of the record for your article and look for a section called “Cited By” which will list any other articles indexed in PubMed that cite the article in your hand.

Another option is to use Google Scholar. Simply search for your article and then look for the “Cited By” link that appears beneath the snippet of text from the article. Click that, and you will see all the articles that Google Scholar thinks cite the study you looked up. Please keep in mind that there may be some duplication here. Sometimes Google Scholar will count one article multiple times in the “Cited By” results, but you should be able to spot these duplicates easily.

Citation tracing is one of several important strategies to use when searching the literature. Thanks to forward citation tracing tools in databases like PubMed and Google Scholar, you can now look forwards in time as well as backwards. As always, if you have questions about this strategy, or other ways to search the literature, please contact a Dana Medical Librarian, who will be happy to assist.