Citation chasing is an incredibly effective method of conducting research, especially in the field of history. Historical research is always compounding; new research is always building off of old research. Because of this, citation chasing is a great way to find more quality sources if you are having difficulties.
If you find yourself stuck with too few sources, but you have identified one really good source, use that as a starting point. At Bridgewater, we call this perfect source the "exemplar source."
Backwards Citation Chasing
This is the more traditional form of citation chasing. It involves looking at and borrowing from the reference material the author of your resource used in their research. To try this:
- Identify the cited references from an article relevant to your topic (look for the reference page, works cited page, bibliography, or footnotes).
- Browse through the references and choose the ones that look relevant to your topic.
- Search for the item title in Discovery in quotation marks.
- Follow the links to the full text in our collection or if it is not available, request the full text through interlibrary loan.
Forwards Citation Chasing
This method of citation chasing involves looking into other research that has cited your resource as reference material. This is generally only available through Google Scholar:
- Copy the title of the exemplar article into Google Scholar, again in quotation marks. This should bring up the article.
- Looking at the record in Google Scholar, there should be a button that reads "Cited by (#)":
- Click on that and then bring up all of the articles that have cited this material. Obviously, if the article is really new, you won't be able to find anything, but if it's been around since 2015 or before, you might end up finding the perfect thing.
- Browse through the titles in this list, or select the checkbox "Search within citing articles" to limit your results some.
