“How can I find more literature?” Citation Searching & Bibliographic Mining
Okay, so, you’ve started your literature review for your postgraduate social sciences dissertation.
But, where do you go from here, how do you find more stuff?
How do you do this properly, systematically, in a way that maximizes your chances of finding super useful stuff? And ensure you don’t waste hours and hours staring at a screen, wondering, “Mm, is that worth looking at?”.
I’ll tell you how. Two literature search strategies. bibliographic mining and citation searching. Or, to give them their more relatable names, backward searching and forward searching.
Grab one of the items that you’ve read. This might be something from your course reading list or something you’ve found independently. It might be a book, a book chapter or a journal article.
First up, backward searching, or bibliographic mining. Go to the bibliography or reference list of the item you’ve read. Go through it, like properly look at it. You’ll find other items that have been produced BEFORE the thing you have read and contributed towards the ideas developed within it.
Secondly, forward searching, or citation searching. Find the item you have read in Google Scholar by entering the title in the search bar. When you find it, you will see something that says, “Cited by” underneath it. Click on that. This will take you to newer, more recent items that have referenced the item you have read. It’s quite likely that there will be something new, or interesting, or relevant for your work, in these items.
Now, a word of warning, once you start clicking on that “Cited by” link, you are in danger of disappearing down a very deep rabbit hole. So, make sure you’re keeping really good records of your searches. This is super important, because when you’re writing up your literature review, you might be like, “Mmmm, did I do a citation search on this? …. Sure I did? … Did I?”.
You could use a source record sheet like the one that’s available in my Literature Search Dissertation Survival Guide! Or, just create your own by making a table in a Word document, Whatever you do, keep a good audit trail because this will save you lots of time later!
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