Further search techniques
Supplementary search techniques may be used as part of your scoping searches, to locate a gold set of relevant articles for testing your search, or, in order to develop a search strategy on a niche topic.
A common techniques is to start with one or more relevant articles and use these as a starting point. This is often called citation searching or snowballing.
Citation searching is a search method that can be done forward or backward in time.
- Forward citation searching retrieves records that have cited an item, also known as “cited by”. This provides you with more recently published articles that may be relevant for your topic.
- Backward citation searching involves records that an item has cited (these will be located in the article's reference list). This is also known as snowballing - using known relevant articles to identify other key articles or search terms.
The main citation databases are Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.
Citation searching in Scopus
Activity: do a citation search using Scopus database
Search for the following article in Scopus to check how many times it has been cited and see if any of the newer articles are relevant to this topic.
Saggers, B., Hwang, Y. S. & Mercer, K. L. (2011). Your voice counts: Listening to the voice of high school students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Australasian Journal of Special Education, 35(2), 173-190. doi:10.1375/ajse.35.2.173
1. Login to Scopus at http://guides.lib.monash.edu/go.php?c=8480086
2. Enter the article title "Your voice counts: Listening to the voice of high school students with Autism Spectrum Disorder" and click the search button.
3. How many times has this article been cited? Click on the number in the Cited by column to view the list of articles.
4. Click on Analyze search results. You can then analyse the strength of specific journals in the field, identify prominent authors and their affiliations, and pinpoint principle subject areas for this query.
