This modules in this section of the tutorial show ways to "look backward" to find older articles that serve as a foundation for our starting article. This can be done using the print or online copy of the starting article or can be done using online tools (without opening the article itself). We'll explore both options.
At any point in time, scholarly research is built upon a foundation of other older scholarly research. As researchers do their work, they read and think about and are inspired by the work done (and published) by others. That older scholarly research sets the foundation and context for new questions that researchers ask and the experiments or studies they design to answer those questions.
Any reader of a scholarly article can indentify the foundation for that work by looking at the article's References or Works Cited section. The items in the References or Works Cited section are also called "cited references" meaning that the author(s) of the article we are looking at cited these references in his or her own article because of their importance and relevance to the topic. Cited references are always older than the current article, so we can refer to this as "looking backward." We can look backward beginning with our starting article (pictured below) and identify articles in the References or Works Cited section that we should consider reading given their relevance to our interest in online identity.
Looking backward into the References section of our starting scholarly article by Tiffany Pempek and her colleagues, we can identify a scholarly article (older, as it was published in 2004) that also addresses online identity, a concept that Pempek and her colleagues discuss. This older article by S.R. Stern addresses online identity in the time before social networking sites became popular and thus provides some historical context and research regarding online identity. This older article is providing part of the foundation for the newer research conducted by Tiffany Pempek and her colleagues.
You do not always need the full text of scholarly articles to look "backward" to find older, related articles in the starting article's References or Works Cited section. There are databases that are designed to help us look backward. One of these databases is Web of Science - a very useful tool! Let's get to work with our starting article.
The image below is of the full record for our starting article in the Web of Science database. Note that off to the right side of the full record, there is a link called Cited References. That link will provide the list of items in the References or Works Cited section of the starting article.
When you click the Cited References link, a new page opens that lets us look "backward" at all the items from the starting article's References or Works Cited section. We can look through the list for other articles that might be of use to us.
Item 13 in the Cited Reference list is the older article about expressions of online identity that we identified earlier.
Not every database has the feature to let you look backward at Cited References. In addition to the Web of Science, here are a few more databases (not a comprehensive list) that have this feature.
