A really useful new feature, once the exclusive preserve of just a couple of specialist databases, is coming soon to all our EBSCO databases, including the Discovery Service - Citation Discovery.
Citation turned into discovery
Every academic book and article references all the sources it draws on. This allows you to go back and check their sources are reliable. What is even more useful is being able to see what has been published since that references a particularly influential article. Some papers unlock an entire new branch of research and get cited by everything published in that subject area, while at other times it is possible to look through a reference list and look up all the papers citing sources in the reference list to find different branching avenues of research. The new Citation Discovery feature allows you to do all that from a single click.
How it works
You will soon see a number beside each article entry representing the number of more recent articles citing it. Click on this to see which papers published more recently have referenced this paper. This lets you follow the most recent research connected to all those papers relevant to your search. Often, following the most heavily cited seminal papers unlocks areas of research where there is very little published or helps reveal the structure of the academic literature - the different branching chains of research stemming from a historical breakthrough. You can follow reference lists to trace research backwards and follow cited references forward, making it simple to trace the development of branching lines of research from an initial search. Whether you found an old paper that everyone has cited or an article that unlocked something new recently in an area with very little published research, following references and citations can often help you find more relevant articles than a simple search.
We used to teach people to search Web of Science (Cited References Search) and Scopus specifically because they offered this feature, and now it has come to the Discovery Service, Business Source Complete, and more. Chaining back and forth through the literature by following references backwards and citing papers forwards can sometimes find far more relevant literature than searching. At other times, searching is what is best. This adds a new and occasionally powerful tool to an already impressive toolkit for finding information at your fingertips.
Calling out retracted research
Occasionally, a research paper is found to contain a serious flaw and is retracted. Until now, it was difficult to know which papers had been discovered to be unreliable but EBSCO intends soon to introduce a retractions feature, which will label these retracted papers so you can be confident you are citing only reliable research.
Stay tuned for further developments in search and research here on the Library blog!