Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering: Cited Reference Searching

Cited reference searching allows you to locate books and articles that cite a previously published resource. This process allows you to track the research that has been done since the original item was published.

• To locate current research based on earlier research
• To determine influential research
• To find out how many times and where a publication is being cited
• To find out who is citing a particular paper
• To find out how a particular research topic is being used to support other research
• To track the history of a research idea
• To track the research history of a researcher
• To determine how well your own published research is cited for promotion/tenure considerations

• Citation rates vary widely from field to field and shouldn't be taken at face value, but considered relative to the field of research
• Citation rate may be based on a few prolific authors citing each other, including self citations
• Citation searching works better for journal articles than books
• Cross-disciplinary research may produce fewer citations
• Coverage of your particular field in the citation database may be weak
• The research may too recent and not widely known, like emerging fields
• The quality of the journal producing the citation
• Distribution of the citations over time might be more indicative of their importance than an initial high citation count shortly after publication
• There is a growing tendency of some researchers to go after topics likely to get into high-impact journals, which jeopardizes creativity, can skew the course or even slow the pace of science
• Some journals also cite articles in editorials, reviews, news and other non-research articles to increase the number of cites
• There is no guarantee that every paper which ought to be cited will be cited. An un-cited author may be ahead of his peers. Mendel and his genetics work went unappreciated for years

Many resources provide information on cited references including the three listed below:

You can set up preferences in Google Scholar on personal computing devices so that the Find It links for your university always display in your Google Scholar search results.