Nazarbayev University LibGuides: AI Tools for Research and Study: Literature Discovery Using Citations

When Keywords Seems Tricky, Use Citations!

When searching for available articles, we normally use keyword searching. However, when keyword searching seems to be a little tricky due to complexity of keywords and search strategies to employ, we can start searching using a single or set of articles that we have and start mining the references. Checking the materials cited by these set of articles or the materials citing these set of articles may be useful in checking the developments and key findings in this research topic.

In discovering literature, Citation Chaining (direct citations) and Citation Mapping (with no direct citation) are two common techniques used to explore scholarly literature and trace the development of ideas and research trends.

Using Citations for Literature Searching, is that Good?

When keyword searching gets a little tricky, mining citations might be a good option to look for more relevant articles. Here are some of the pros and cons of using citations for literature searching:

PROS

CONS

Usually starts with a single (i.e. ideal) article (seed paper)
Allows to see progress and development of key findings over time.
Fosters in-depth and powerful searching using citations.
Mines more relevant sources of information using just one source.
Makes citation searching/tracing/snowballing etc. easy
Enables you to find relevant papers even if you miss out the right keywords.
Visualizations can be interesting or useful. Looking for the "ideal" article might be time consuming.

Can be limiting and can keep you from discovering other valuable research.
Not all citations are created equal.
Simply looking for bibliography doesn't mean that the articles are relevant.
While these indexes are broad, they lack citations of books/monographs -- may have problems with humanities, law materials
May not be able to extract footnotes and "unusual" citation styles.
Source issues e.g. lack of case studies, older humanities monographs, etc.
Citation extraction issues --may not be able to extract footnotes and "unusual" citation styles.

Attribution

The AI Tools for Research and Study guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Credits: The AI Tools for Research and Study guide includes content from Literature Discovery through Citation Chaining and Mapping, by Aster Zhao, of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology licensed under a CC BY 4.0.