BUILD Scholars

BUILD (Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity) is an initiative to support diversity and student success in the biomedical sciences, supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Citation & Author Searching

Did you find an good article on your topic and you want to find more articles on the same topic? A good way to find additional sources is to do some citation searching.


Forward Citation Search: Start with an article that you like. How many researchers have cited that article since its publication? This search looks forward in time to see how this article contributed to the scholarly conversation. 

  • Look up the article by title in Google Scholar. Look for a link that says "Cited by xxxx" and click on it. Look through the list of articles to see if you can find more articles that are similar to the topic of the original article.
  • Common databases that will also include "cited by" links include PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus.

Backward Citation Search: Start with an article that you like. Go to the end of the article to see a list of references. All of those references were cited in the article. This search looks backwards in time to see what led to the research in the current article.

Author Citation Search: Researchers usually focus on a narrow area of research. If you find a good article on a specific topic by a person or group, look for other articles that they wrote. Do they have a Google Scholar page that lists all of their publications? Do they have an institutional profile page where they list their publications?