Skip to Main Content

Healthcare Quality & Safety

About Cited Reference Searching

You can use Google Scholar to find out how many and which authors have cited a particular work. This information is helpful for:

  • promotion and tenure purposes because it demonstrates one's contribution to the literature and scholarly impact
  • identifying important articles in a particular field; those with higher "cited by" numbers are likely key articles on a topic
  • finding more articles related to your search topic
  • identifying experts in a particular field

Email Alerts

Google Scholar allows one to set up automatic email alerts for cited reference searches which will send you an email any time a new article is found by Google Scholar that cites an article of interest. For example, you can be notified when your own articles are cited by others.

Search for Specific Article

To find out how many and which authors have cited a particular article, follow the steps below:

1) Enter the title of the article you're looking for in quotes and click Search. Once you find the article, you can look at the Cited by link underneath it to see how many other articles indexed by Google Scholar have cited this particular work. Click the Cited by link to view a list of the specific articles that cited this article.

2) This will pull up a list of all 32 articles that have cited the "Genetic testing in autism" article. From this screen you can click the Create email alert link at the top so that you will be notified when new articles come out that cite the "Genetic testing in autism" article.

Search for Specific Author

You may also wish to search Google Scholar by a particular author (e.g., yourself or a colleague). To do this, you will need to include all the different ways the author's name may appear in a citation because different citation styles require different formatting of authors' names. For example, if we want to see how many times and which authors have cited Gail E. Herman, we would need to format our search statement something like this:

ge-herman OR g-herman OR herman-ge

If you're searching for a common name that retrieves many irrelevant results, try adding last names of co-authors or keywords to your search. In this example, let's say you know the author's primary research topic is genetics and autism. You could revise the search statement to:

ge-herman OR g-herman OR herman-ge gene autism

Once you click Search, you can click the Cited by link under each citation to see who has cited each article.

© UAB Libraries ι University of Alabama at Birmingham ι About Us ι Contact Us ι Disclaimer