"Cited-Reference Searching" is a process where you start with a reference (normally a journal article or book) that you have read and which is important for your research.

You then search for other publications that have cited that reference.

If the reference that you started with was highly relevant to your research, it is quite possible that other publications that have cited that reference are also relevant to your research.

Cited-reference searching is a useful alternative to keyword searching. Keyword searching is often difficult, especially in the humanities and social sciences. The English language is rich in synonyms, and there are so many narrower or broader terms which might also be relevant. With cited reference searching, you are searching with concrete search terms (i.e. the title and author of the cited reference).

There are three databases which are particularly useful for cited-reference searching:

Web of Science

• Incorporates three databases: Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Will find citations in major journals and conference proceedings and also in some books.
• Select the Cited Reference Search option and enter the details of the cited reference.
• For journal articles, you can enter author, abbreviated journal name (Cited Work) and publication year, or any combination of these. For example, if you enter just the author name and a year, the search results will show all cited articles published by that author in that year. If you enter the journal name, you must use the Web of Science abbreviation.
• For books, enter the author name. In the Cited Work box, enter just the first syllable of the first word of the title, with the asterisk as truncation symbol, e.g. hist* and preferably enter no year of publication (because books are often reprinted in subsequent years).

Scopus

• Particularly useful in the sciences, but is improving its coverage of the social sciences and humanities. Will find citations in major journals and scholarly websites.
• Select the Document Search option.
• Enter the title of the reference in the search box, enclosed in double quotation marks. In the fields menu box, use the drop-down menu to select References. If necessary, add a second search field to also search for the author's last name in the References field.
• Alternatively, use the Advanced Search option. Enter the author's last name and some words from the title in the following format: REF(watson molecular structure nucleic acids)

Google Scholar

• A free database which will find citations in electronic journal websites and scholarly websites.
• Use the drop-down menu in the Search box to display all the search options.
• Use the exact phrase search box for the title of the reference, and use the where my words occur menu to select in the title of the article.
• Use the return articles authored by search box for the author's last name.
• Search to locate the reference. When the reference is retrieved, click on the Cited by… link to display the references which cite the reference.

In theory, you can perform cited-reference searching in any full-text database. If the database contains the full text of books or articles, then you should be able to search the references and bibliographies of those books and articles. This means that you can perform cited reference searching in journal article databases like JSTOR and ScienceDirect. You can also use databases which contain the full text of books, such as Google Book Search.

There are other databases which contain abstracts only, but which index all the cited references in the articles which they abstract. Psycinfo is an example.

The search method varies. In full-text databases you may have to use a search option such as All Fields or All Text and search for the title of the book or journal article. If possible, search for the title as a phrase. Some databases provide an option to limit your search to the cited references. Look for a search option such as References.