Citation Searches
Thomas Mann · 2005
Abstract We have seen so far that the techniques of controlled vocabulary searching, general browsing and focused browsing in classified bookstacks, and keyword searching each have advantages and disadvantages. There are still other means of gaining subject access to written records; one of the most important is citation searching. This approach, like the others, is potentially applicable in any subject area; and it, too, has both strengths and limitations. In citation searching you must start with a known source that is relevant to your topic. It may be a book, a journal article, a conference paper, a dissertation, a technical report, an unpublished manuscript—it can be any kind of knowledge record. Further, the date of the starting-point source is irrelevant: it can be something published last year or centuries ago. What a citation search will tell you is whether someone has written a subsequent scholarly journal article that cites your source in a footnote, as a follow-up discussion of it, or at least reference to it. The assumption is that a later work which cites an earlier one is probably talking about the same subject. This is sometimes not true—a work can be cited in a context irrelevant to your interests—but the connection works often enough that you will want to make use of it.