Skip to Main Content

Use One Good Article to Find Others

Overview & Contents

This modules in this section of the tutorial show ways to "look foward" to find newer articles that build on the research in our starting article. The number of newer articles that link back to a starting article also help us make some judgements about the importance of the starting article.

Using "Times Cited" or "Cited by" to Judge Article Importance

When researchers refer to (or cite) the work of other researchers, they are telling the reader that these items are important to the research topic in question. If lots of researchers cite the same article, it means that the article has important information to communicate. This idea of article importance can help the new researcher (including you, as students) decide what articles are more valuable to read first.

We can use "Times Cited" to help us sort articles so that the ones that have been cited most often by others sit at the top of our results lists.

web of science sorted by times cited