Introduction

So far, we’ve covered a bit of information history at large, focusing in greater detail on how the technological advancements of the 20th century have informed how we organize and access information today. We’ve also discussed the foundations of the Internet, an indispensable tool for navigating information in the 21st century.

However, information history can also refer to the history (and future) of individual sources. In this short chapter, we cover two important research strategies: exploring the bibliography and reverse citation searching.

Strategy One: Exploring the Bibliography

As we covered in Week 2, most scholarly books and journal articles (and even some popular sources) include a bibliography: a list of sources at the end of the work that tell a reader which other articles, books, and other materials the author referenced.

Researchers have been using this strategy for a long time. It’s part of the reason proper citation is so important. Even before the ease of digital searching, scholars could find a print article in a bound journal on a library shelf, read the bibliography, then locate the journal, volume, issue, and page numbers of a different but still relevant article somewhere else in the building. Today, a quicker strategy might be to copy and paste the new article title into the library search to see whether we have access.

Though the bibliography is only a small selection of what has likely been written on the topic, it offers a peek into the history of that field of research.

Strategy Two: Reverse Citation Search

Historically, journal articles and book chapters could be found physically anchored to the journals or books they were published in. If you wanted to find out who later used that source in their own articles (i.e., the article’s future, rather than its past), it would be a cumbersome task, requiring sorting through massive print indexes. This task was rarely undertaken by anyone but the most dedicated specialists.

In the modern information landscape, individual journal articles or book chapters are often visually decoupled from their larger context (i.e., the journal or book they were published in). They are independent digital objects with unique identifiers, like a DOI. This new paradigm means that digital tools can more easily track when an article is cited in a later-published work. This strategy, which has several names (reverse citation search, forward citation search, or citation tracking), allows you to find updated publications relevant to your research topic. You search the “future” of the article’s influence on its field post-publication.

There are some library databases that make this strategy relatively easy (e.g., Scopus), but you can also achieve the same goal through Google Scholar.

Take the following steps:

1. Find your source in Google Scholar. The easiest strategy is to copy and paste the title, if you have it.
2. Find the entry for your source in the search results.
3. Click the blue “Cited by” link.

Note: This strategy doesn’t always yield helpful resources (especially if you’ve selected a newer publication that hasn’t had time to accumulate a high citation count), but it is a worthwhile tool to have in your searching tool belt.

Remember: You can connect UMSL Libraries to Google Scholar – review the Google Scholar reading to find out how.