Looking Forward
When we look forward, we're doing something called cited reference searching. Basically, it allows us to see who has responded to, disagreed with, or built upon someone else's publication.
Let's use the example article from the previous page. Here's the citation for that article:
Wright, A. M., Aldhalimi, A., Lumley, M. A., Jamil, H., Pole, N., Arnetz, J. E., & Arnetz, B. B. (2016). Determinants of resource needs and utilization among refugees over time. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 51(4), 539-549. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-015-1121-3
One of the easiest ways to "look forward" is to search Google Scholar. You may also see a similar feature in certain databases (ex. "Times cited in this database").
Click on the Cited by link for that citation, and you'll get a list of publications that cited your original publication.
In this example, only 6 publications cited the original article. However, you might find that hundreds – or even thousands – of people have cited your original article. If that's the case, you can search those citations to narrow down your results - just make sure to click the box next to Search within citing articles.
How to get the articles you see in Google Scholar
There are two ways you can check to see if the library has access to a citation you find in Google Scholar:
- Easy way: Set up your Google Scholar settings to link up with the library
- Harder way: Follow the instructions for known-item searching
Again – if the library doesn't have access to the article, you can request it via interlibrary loan!