When you have found an article which deals with your subject, you can use it for finding other publications on the same subject. In the basic course, you learned that you can find older literature with the help of the bibliographies in articles that you found. If you would like to find more recent articles, then you can use the “cited by” function.
Let’s say that you are searching for information on the link between mortality rates and air pollution caused by traffic in Amsterdam. Looking in the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences Library, you find the following article:
The article is highly relevant to your subject, but it is not very recent.
If you now click “cited by”, you will see an overview of the sources that have quoted this article. There is a good chance that this overview will contain articles on the same subject. The articles you find this way will always be more recent than the article from which the citation is taken.
In addition, the number of citations tells you something about the article itself. If the article has been cited a lot, it is probably of major significance.
By clicking “citations”, you will see an overview of older articles to which the article makes reference.
Tip: Google Scholar also offers both options.
Some databases also have a citation index. In Science Direct, for example, there is the Citing Articles option to the right of each article.
Who has cited whom, and what has been cited, can be found in the Web of Science database. This is where you can find references to scientific articles, among other things. If an article is also available in one of our databases, you can retrieve the full text straight away.