How to Find Sources

‘Citation mining’ utilizes known information about a specific article to identify other articles that are relevant. Just like you are required to cite relevant information from other researchers in your research projects, published scholars refer to other articles, studies, or books in their work. Once you find a relevant scholarly article, then, you can: 

1. Search for other publications by the same author

Scholars typically focus on one area of study and publish numerous articles on that topic over a given period of time. So, it is likely you will find other useful articles by that same author. To find them, many databases will link the author's name to other articles they have written.  You may, of course, do an author search using the name as well. It is particularly valuable to do an author search in other relevant databases. Each database has its own unique suite of journals (and some provide books/book chapters), so you may find unique articles by the same author in one  database that are not in another..

2. Review their References

list in the article to see if there are any other relevant articles in it.

3. Review articles that cite the article.

To do this, search for your "perfect" article's title in Google Scholar. Then click on the "Cited by" or "Related articles" links (see the image below). The "Cited by" link will give you  numerous articles that thought your "perfect" article was valuable enough to cite. Chances are, many of those will be useful for your research also. The "Related articles" link will give you articles the Google algorithm identifies as similar to yours. Some of these articles might be valuable.

Note: It takes time to publish articles, so if your ‘perfect’ article is recent, it likely will not have many articles that cite it yet.