Citation Trails

Citations are an important part of the research process, as they not only credit external texts that have influenced new work, but create a trail that researchers can use to discover relevant, popular, and influential literature within a given area.

A wood plank pathway leading away from the camera with pine trees lining either side.

Using Citations

A citation is used within a body of text when content that did not originate with you is used to support your writing. This includes words, thoughts or ideas, audiovisual materials, and direct quotes. Other researchers may look to your publications to track what sources you have used. Likewise, tracking citation in other researchers works, or following a citation trail, allows you to start with one publication and find research that refers to it. The number of times a publication is cited by other researchers is one indication of the influence of that publication.

Citation trails are useful, because they allow you to find out how often a publication has been cited and find more publications relevant to the topic!

Where to Look:

Google Scholar includes a “cited by” link at the bottom of every item on the results list. Following it brings you to a list of articles that cited a specific paper. It is very easy to find academic conversations through this feature!

Google Scholar screen shot showing a link to "cited by."

The image below is an example of the “cited by” list Google Scholar generates. Try this out for work in your discipline!

Google Scholar screen shot showing a list of citations, the result after clicking "cited by."

Web of Science is a multidisciplinary database available through the UW Libraries that connects you to citing references and measures of impact. All references contain a link to any articles in Web of Science that cite it. To do a more thorough search, choose “Cited References” to look up your article of interest and follow a citation trail. You’ll see links to publications that were cited within that article, as well as later publications that cited your article.

Web of Science screen shot showing how to formulate a reference search.

UW Libraries Search also includes a function that helps you to find related materials by linking to citations related to a given article. When you are logged in with your UW NetID, you can access this feature as icons to “find sources citing this” and “find sources cited in this.” Not all articles have these links on the site, however.

screen shot showing the uw libraries search buttons "citing this" and "cited in this"

To learn more about the Citation Trail function of UW Libraries Search, see this overview.
To learn more about Cited Reference Searching and the use of Google Scholar and Web of Science, see the Cited Reference Searching Guide.