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Cited Reference Searching: Home

Cited reference searching in Web of Science and Google Scholar.

Cited reference searching allows you to: find articles, books, and other materials that have cited a previous work, follow the scholarly conversation on your topic forward in time, and find the most recent works related to your research topic. Web of Science vs. Google Scholar. Curation: Sources in Web of Science are selection for inclusion by humans on literature review committees. Google Scholar’s sources are machine-curated; the Google Scholar search engine decides if results are scholarly. Sources: Web of Science focuses on indexing the top journal in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Google Scholar includes a wide variety of source types including journal articles, books, conference proceedings, pre-prints, and more. Quality: Because humans select the top journals that are included in Web of Science, you can feel confident that the results are scholarly. Because results in Google Scholar are machine-selected and include various source types, you many encounter some non-scholarly results. Watch the video for a demonstration of cited reference searching in Web of Science and Google Scholar.