English 201 Library Research

Finding Too Many Relevant Articles on Your Issue?

Scopus is a database that analyzes the references in scholarly articles. It allows you to locate key articles, or the ones that have been cited numerous times by other scholars. It also is a great way of finding newer articles that have cited an older article you have already located.

Note: Click on the + icon on the right to add more AND search terms. Click Limit to add a date range.

Click the Search button. On the Results page, on the upper right part of the screen there is a box labeled Sort ON:. Change the dropdown menu from Date (newest) to Cited by (highest).

Found a Great Article, But It's Several Years Old?

Scopus is also very useful for finding articles that cited a particular article. You may have a really good journal article, but it’s a bit old. To try to find newer articles that cited the older article, type in the title of the article and the last name of the author. No need to change the defaults in the dropdown menus – Web of Science assumes that you are doing this exact type of search!

Let’s say I found this article during my research, and I want to find articles that cited it.

Verbruggen, Aviel. "Renewable and Nuclear Power: A Common Future?." Energy Policy 36.11 (2008): 4036-4047.

Type in the title of the article as Article title, and the last name of the first author listed as Authors. 

Note: If it says “no results found,” then Scopus either did not analyze that particular journal (there are 20,000+ journals covered, most of them scientific ones), or your article is too old. Scopus goes back to 1970, though some titles go back further in time. 

You can also try Google Scholar and click the Cited by # link to see what articles Google's algorithm determined cited your favorite article.

You should get only a few results. In my case, I only got one result. It says it was cited by 64 sources. Click the box corresponding to your article, then you can click View cited by in the gray bar.

You can peruse the results, or if there are too many, you can narrow by keyword in the Search within results... box, or any of the Refine results limiters, on the left side. To find the full text, just click the Check for Full Text link and it will go to the record in the EWU Library Catalog for where we have it online, if we have it in print, or a link to Interlibrary Loan if we don't have access to it.