How to find information for science or health based literature reviews

Citation searching allows you to follow the research trail forward and backwards in time! 

Even if you find just a few research papers at the beginning, there are very easy ways of using those first papers to find many more! 

Imagine you have identified the classic paper where a specific method was first reported or a set of influential papers that have moved on the understanding within the field. You now wish to explore how the field has developed since that paper/s was published by looking at the more recent articles that cite your original paper.

You can follow the research trail backwards:

Most academic research comes with a reference list at the end: you can use the reference list to find related articles on the same topic as your original paper.

This is perfectly acceptable to do and one of the reasons why referencing exists. However, anything you find will be older than your original paper, since the authors would have had to read it as before they started writing. 

Look at the references at the end of the paper to understand which papers and which researchers the author had read and cited.

You can follow the research trail forwards:

Explore who has cited the article since it was published. 

Some citation searching databases keep a record of who is referencing whom: this means that when you look up an article in that database, there will be a link to show you other articles which referenced that original article.

Because the original article had to be published before anyone else could reference it, this means that any articles that reference it must be more recent.

Citation searching enable you to find older and newer material with very little effort. 

 Activity 1: Put this into practice with an article

1. Go to either Web of Science or Scopus.
2. Use the title of an article you found during your scoping searches.
3. Search for the article and then look into the past by looking at the reference list.
4. Look into the future by looking who has cited your original paper.

 Activity 2: Put this into practice with search terms.

1. Go to either Web of Science or Scopus.
2. Put broad search terms into the search e.g. Honey AND wound*
3. Run the search.
4. You will now see a list of all articles that match those search terms.
5. Sort the results by citation.
6. You will now see the papers ranked into most cited papers in relation to honey and wound*.

Important thing to note!

If the article of interest is not indexed in Web of Science or Scopus, you will not be able to find it in the database and there will be no citation data for the article in those resources.

As an alternative, you could look up the article in Google Scholar to see if there is any citation data in the listing of the article in Google Scholar.

Many databases have specialist features which enable you to:

• View the article's references as part of the database record.
• Find more recent articles which have referenced the article by using the “Times Cited” or “Cited by” link in the record.

Citation searching is available in a number of specialist resources.

When choosing which resource to use for citation searching you should consider the following points:

• Does the resource cover my subject area?
• What is the range and coverage of the citation data?
• Do I need to citation search across multiple resources?

We recommend using citation data within Web of Science or Scopus due to size of of the databases but the feature may be available in other resources.

A citation is a metric.

A metric is a way of measuring something. The something in this case... is a cite.

The action of citing another persons work can be reduced to a number. If a paper has been cited five times, it was been mentioned five times by others authors in their work.

Many databases (but not all) include a feature called a citation sort. When you have run your search, you can sort your results in a number of ways eg. date, relevance or citation. There are other ways to sort results and we have used these three as examples to help you understand the options you have.

What am I doing when I sorting by highest citation?

You will be ranking your search by articles which have had the most citations. You may be viewing papers that have:

• had an impact (positive or negative).
• been read by a wide number of people.
• a wider potential readership as the paper relates to a field with a massive audience. 
• been published within a subject that tends to use citations in higher volumes than others.

The paper could be a review, a methods paper or a classic paper. These papers can sometimes have higher citation counts than a primary / original research paper.

Why may this be an issue?

When we sort by citation, we may be accidentally perpetuating citation bias. We may be choosing high citation papers over low citation papers without considering or evaluating articles with low citations which are relevant.

By perpetuating citation bias, we may be excluding work by researchers which is of high quality. To avoid this, we need to be responsible with how we use metrics like citation sort and ensure we are evaluating all the relevant information available to ourselves as researchers.

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• Mindfulness.
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• Keep learning.