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PSC 500: Citation Mining

This guide is for PSC 500 classes.

Citation Mining

Citation mining is when you use a relevant book or article to find more resources on the same topic.

Everything published about a topic is part of the scholarly conversation. This scholarly conversation happens over many years as more resources continue to be published. These resources can fit into a timeline based on their publication date. You can move forwards and backwards on the scholarly communication timeline through citation mining.

You can use citation mining to move forward in time and find new resources that cite your current resource. You can use citation mining to go backward in time and find the old resources that your current resource cites.

Screenshot of a Scholarly Conversation timeline going from "The Far Past" to "The Present." "Your current item" is marked on the timeline. Your current item may cite older items. Newer items may cite your current item.

Citation Mining Backwards

When you use citation mining to move backwards in time, you are looking for resources that your current resource cites.

You can find older related resources in two different ways:

  • Use an author's name to find more resources written by that author.
  • Find the items that your resource references.

How to Mine for Citations:

  1.  Use the reference list of an article or book to find another potential source.Screenshot of an article's References page.
  2. Search the author's name in OneSearch for USA Libraries. Make sure to write the surname first and to select the "Author" button.sScreenshot of the OneSearch for USA Libraries search bar
  3. Search the title of another work in Google Scholar. Make sure to log in to your JagMail account in that browser before making any searches.Screenshot of Google Scholar search result
  4. Select the "Full-Text@USA" option below the article you want to read. You might need to click on the arrows to show this option.
  5. If you do not have the "Full-Text@USA" option, please make sure you are signed into your JagMail email on your browser.
  6. If you cannot access the article, if there are no Full-Text@USA options, or if the article is behind a paywall, please request the article through Interlibrary Loan.

Citation Mining Forwards

When you use citation mining to move forwards in time, you are looking for more recently published works that cite your current resource.

This can help you also with finding out which items are seminal works on your topic. If a resource is really important, it will be cited by many later works!

Scopus

Scopus is an index of articles and other publications. Scopus does not index every article; some journals are not included, and those citations will not be shown. These journals aren't omitted only for low quality; high quality journals might just not be on Scopus's list.

However, using Scopus can give you a good idea of how highly cited an article is.

You can visit Scopus by finding "Scopus" in the Database & e-Reference link under Library Resources on the Marx Library homepage.

Google Scholar

You can citation mine in Google Scholar. You move forward in time by selecting the "Cited by #" button below each listed article. 

Screenshot of a search return in Google Scholar

You can continue moving forward in the scholarly conversation timeline by continuing to click on the "Cited by #" below the list of new articles you are presented. 

Google Scholar indexes a very large range of resources. Not all articles listed will be from quality journals. The number of citations are one clue to the quality of that article. An article with many citations is more likely to be useful and important. What number of citations is "many" depends on your discipline.