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Cited Reference Searching: A Skill Guide
Introduction
Among Cornell University Library's hundreds of databases, a number of them also allow you to track the flow of research by including ways to identify references that cite or are cited by other scholarly sources.
This guide introduces databases that have this feature to assist you in your research. For further information, or to locate other sources not listed here, please consult a reference librarian.
EBSCO databases
Within this large umbrella of databases, the following specific databases include a cited reference feature *.
* PLEASE NOTE: Unless otherwise specified, these databases offer a Cited
References link in the top menu of the database search page.
This multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than 4,600 journals, including full text for nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
America: History & Life is a complete bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. With indexing for 1,700 journals from as far back as 1910, this database is without question the most important bibliographic reference tool for students and scholars of U.S. and Canadian history.
* Go to Top Menu More to select Cited References
Business Source Complete is the world's definitive scholarly business database, providing the leading collection of bibliographic and full text content. As part of the comprehensive coverage offered by this database, indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back as far as 1886 are included. In addition, searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,300 journals.
CINAHL is the authoritative resource for nursing and allied health professionals, students, educators and researchers. This database provides indexing for nearly 3,000 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health. The database contains more than 2.2 million records dating back to 1981.
Communication & Mass Media Complete
Communication & Mass Media Complete provides the most robust, quality research solution in areas related to communication and mass media. CMMC incorporates the content of CommSearch (formerly produced by the National Communication Association) and Mass Media Articles Index (formerly produced by Penn State) along with numerous other journals in communication, mass media, and other closely-related fields of study to create a research and reference resource of unprecedented scope and depth encompassing the breadth of the communication discipline. CMMC offers cover-to-cover ("core") indexing and abstracts for more than 550 journals, and selected ("priority") coverage of nearly 200 more, for a combined coverage of 737 titles. Furthermore, this database includes full text for over 440 journals.
Environment Index contains more than 1,957,000 records from more than 1,700 domestic and international titles going back to the 1940's (including 1,125 active core titles) as well as more than 120 monographs. Environment Index also features an in-depth thesaurus, and author profiles will be provided for 6,500 authors in the discipline.
Historical Abstracts is an exceptional resource that covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more - essential for libraries supporting upper-division and graduate research. This authoritative database provides indexing of more than 2,300 academic historical journals in over 40 languages back to 1955.
Hospitality and Tourism Complete
Hospitality & Tourism Complete covers scholarly research and industry news relating to all areas of hospitality and tourism. This collection contains more than 828,000 records, with coverage dating as far back as 1965. There is full text for more than 490 publications, including periodicals, company & country reports, and books.
Humanities International Index
Humanities International Index is a comprehensive database covering journals, books and other important reference sources in the humanities. Produced by Whitston Publishing (an imprint of EBSCO Publishing), Humanities International Index provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for more than 2,200 journals and contains more than 2.80 million records.
Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts *
* Go to Top Menu More to select Cited References
Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) indexes more than 560 core journals, nearly 50 priority journals, and nearly 125 selective journals; plus books, research reports and proceedings. Subject coverage includes librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Coverage in the database extends back as far as the mid-1960s.
Music Index is a comprehensive guide to music periodicals and literature featuring digitized content from 1970 to present. This database contains cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts of articles about music, musicians, and the music industry for more than 475 periodicals, as well as book reviews, obituaries, news, and selective coverage for more than 230 periodicals. The comprehensive coverage of the music field and every aspect of the classical and popular worlds of music makes Music Index an invaluable resource for both novice and scholar. Music Index cites: Book Reviews, Obituaries, News Periodicals, News and articles about music, musicians, and the music industry.
PsycARTICLES, from the American Psychological Association (APA), is a definitive source of full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific articles in psychology. The database contains approximately 150,000 articles from over 70 journals published by the APA, and its imprint the Educational Publishing Foundation (EPF), and from allied organizations including the Canadian Psychology Association and Hogrefe Publishing Group.
PsycINFO, American Psychological Association’s (APA) resource for abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. It contains approximately 3 million citations and summaries dating as far back as the 1600's with DOI's for over 1.4 million records. Journal coverage, which spans from the 1800's to present, includes international material selected from around 2,400 periodicals in dozens of languages.
For more information about the citation style, see Frequently Asked Questions About APA Style.
* Go to Top Menu More to select Cited References
SocINDEX with Full Text is the world's most comprehensive and highest quality sociology research database. The database features more than 2,100,000 records with subject headings from a 20,000+ term sociological thesaurus designed by subject experts and expert lexicographers. SocINDEX with Full Text contains full text for more than 820 journals dating back to 1908. This database also includes full text for more than 830 books and monographs, and full text for 14,636 conference papers.
By selecting the Cited References link, you can choose to search in this database by cited author, cited title, cited source, cited year, and all citation fields. You can also select cited references, related records, and times cited in this database.
For more assistance, go directly to the EBSCO Help Page.
Web of Science
Web of Science provides seamless access to current and retrospective multidisciplinary information from approximately 8,700 of the most prestigious, high impact research journals in the world. It also provides cited reference searching. With it, users can navigate forward, backward, and through the literature, searching all disciplines and time spans to uncover all the information relevant to their research. Users can also navigate to electronic full-text journal articles.
ISI citation databases are multidisciplinary databases of bibliographic information indexed to be searched by subject, author, journal, and/or author address. They can also be searched for articles that cite a known author or work. Cited reference searching allows use of a given work as if it were a subject term, to identify more recent articles on the same topic.
Within this, Web of Science offers three citation databases:
Science Citation Index Expanded ~ Social Sciences Citation Index ~
Arts & Humanities Citation Index
These citation databases contain information gathered from thousands of scholarly journals and include references cited by the authors of the articles.
Cited reference searching enables you to find articles that have cited a previously published work. Through a cited reference search, you can discover how a known idea or innovation has been confirmed, applied, improved, extended, or corrected. Every reference listed on the page has been cited by at least one article indexed in Web of Science.
Cited references are sorted alphabetically by cited author. References containing the same cited author are sorted alphabetically by cited work. References with the same cited author and cited work are sorted in reverse chronological order by cited year.
For more assistance, Web of Science offers a tutorial of their features.
SciFinder Scholar & SciFinder
SciFinder Scholar and SciFinder provide online access to several databases, including Chemical Abstracts, Registry, CASREACT, CHEMLIST, CHEMCAT, and MEDLINE. They provide access to CAplus, a database of chemical literature and U.S. and foreign chemical-related patents, CASREACT, and the Registry database from Chemical Abstracts Service.
They include journal articles, book chapters, patents, conference proceedings, technical reports, substance database and dissertations covered in Chemical Abstracts as well as articles currently being indexed, book reviews and biographical information. They cover chemistry, biotechnology, agricultural chemistry, toxicology, environmental science, medicine, and food science, from 1907 to the present. They also includes compounds identified in the CAS registry since 1957.
Both provide access to cited references, as well as citing references. See steps below.
SciFinder Scholar is a database available on all library and CIT lab workstations, where it is listed in the START menu. To use SciFinder Scholar on your personal or office computer, however, you must download SciFinder Scholar, using the steps provided.
To view the Cited and/or Citing References corresponding to your search results, click on the Get Related button at the bottom of the screen.
- Select Cited References to view the references cited in the selected documents.
- Select Citing References to view the references citing the selected documents.
SciFinder is the new web version of the database. It does not require downloading, and may be accessed from any computer. You must, however, create an account, using the links provided. The account is free to Cornell students, faculty and staff.
To view the Cited and/or Citing References corresponding to your search results, look at the top of the list of results, and:
- Select Get Cited to view the references cited in the selected documents.
- Select Get Citing to view the references citing the selected documents.
For more information on SciFinder Scholar citations, see How to... Identify Related Citations, then scroll down to Cited References or Citing References.