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As you continue to do research for your annotated bibliography assignment, you may find you are running out of new sources. This video will cover a few advanced strategies you can add to your searches to retrieve new relevant research results.  Title Slide
Cover two strategies in this video citation mining and journal browsing. Both strategies will rely on using the sources you've already discovered to lead you to others. Citation mining is the process of tracking citations to a given article to find related articles. You can use citation mining to find both older and more recent articles similar to the ones you've already found. 

Tracking citations to a give article forward and backward in time to find out:

  • who the author(s) of a given article cited and
  • who cited the article after it was published.
For both the forward and backward citation mining, we'll use this article as our example. A Multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. To look backward, you'll want to start with the article's reference list. The thinking here is that if an article you've already determined to be relevant to your problem of practice is citing a source in their research, that cited source may also be relevant to your problem of practice.  Fischer, L., Hilton, J., Robinson, T. J. & Wiley D. A. (2015). A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27(3), pp. 159-172. 
Browse the article's reference list to see if any of the titles seem to be related to your problem of practice. If you spot one, copy the article title here. We're copying an article titled The Cost and Quality of Online Open Textbooks: Perceptions of Community College Faculty and Students.  Fischer et. al. References list. 
Then head over to the library website at library. northeastern.edu and paste the article title in quotes into the Scholar OneSearch box and run your search.  Library website.
This will help you determine if we have the article available in full text. As you'll see here, we have the full text available and then look to the View online and click on the database or journals Links posted here to get the full text.  Scholar OneSearch results for "the cost and quality of online open textbooks:
If you don't see your article title in your results, you can place an interlibrary loan request for the article by returning to the library homepage clicking on interlibrary loan on the right side of the page and clicking the Access Your ILLiad account button.  Library website.
Here, you'll log in with your My Northeastern username and password and place the request for the article that you would like to view. These requests typically take 1 to 2 business days to complete and are of no cost to you. When you're using this method to find sources remember to always double check UlrichsWeb to verify that you've actually located a peer reviewed journal since these are sources you're finding in a reference list of another source.  ILLiad login and new request form. 
To do that, remember to copy the journal title not the article title. In this case, our journal title is first Monday and head back to the library website.  Example open journal website: First Monday. 
Go to the databases A-Z button, click on U and choose UlrichsWeb, paste your journal title into UlrichsWeb and look for the referee shirt icon to the left of the journal title. If you don't see that icon, you have not located a peer reviewed journal article and you will need to find another source for the annotated bibliography assignment.  Library website, A-Z Databases list, Ulrich's web search for: First Monday

There are two resources you can use for citation mining that look forward in time, Web of Science and Google Scholar. The thinking here is that if you found an article relevant to your research, you may also find articles relevant that used that article in their own research.

This process works best on articles that are at least a couple of years old because it gives them time to be cited. Brand new articles haven't been out long enough to have been cited yet by others. We've already covered this process in the Google Scholar video, so we'll focus on Web of Science in this video.

  

Web of Science is a library database that you can access from the Education guide or from the databases A to Z list on the library homepage. To use Web of Science to see who has cited a given article, first, make note of the publication information for your chosen article.

You'll want to copy the article title, make note of the author and the publication date. In this example our Article title is a multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. The first author is Fischer and it was published in 2015. 

Education guide; Databases A-Z list; sample article. 

 
Then go to Web of Science and click on the cited reference search option. Fill out the fields with the information for your chosen article. So we'll put in the author's name. Put in the article title and make sure you choose cited title from the dropdown options and then the publication year and run your search. You may see one or more results. On the far right column you'll see a heading for citing articles. Click on the number here to see a list of articles that cited the one that you found from this list. You'll also be able to see how many sources cited each of these articles by looking on the right side of the page. These are also hyperlinked so you can trace these citations even further forward in time.  Web of Science Cited Reference search
The second advanced search strategy is journal browsing. Like citation mining, you'll use the sources you've already found to lead you to others. In this case, you'll want to look at the sources you've gathered so far as a whole. Are there certain journal titles that are appearing more than once? If so, these journals may be publishing a lot in your area of research. You can browse recent issues of that journal to make sure you didn't miss any relevant sources from previous searches. Once you've identified journals of interest for our purposes, we'll use the Journal of Computing and Higher Education, which published the study we've been looking at throughout this tutorial.   
Go to the library homepage and click on the journals A-Z button below the large search box. Here, type or paste in the title of your journal. And run your search. Click online access and then follow the database links to browse the most recent years. Look for any potentially relevant articles in issue tables of contents. You may find sources that were missed by previous searches, and you can then conduct citation mining on any new sources you've found to lead you to even more.  eJournals Search for the Journal of Computing and Higher Education.
As you're searching remember that every new source you find can potentially lead you to additional sources through its reference list, the journal in which it was published, or by checking to see who has cited it. If you have any questions about this process, contact me at L.homol@northeastern.edu 

Closing Slide: Ask a Librarian library.northeastern.edu/ask

l.homol@northeastern.edu