Backward Chaining
Once you find an article or book relevant to your research topic, the references or works cited section will give you the citation information the author(s) used to develop their own ideas. This is a great way to find other sources that relate to your topic.
To find these sources, you will simply take the title of any source from the reference list and search them in the BGSU Library Catalog or Summon.
Resources cited in your article
- will be older than the article
- will help you identify past resources on the same topic (such as theories or classic articles)
Librarian
Citation Chaining
If you're conducting a literature review or struggling to locate relevant sources for a research project, you may want to use a research strategy called citation chaining to help find sources related to your topic. Citation chaining is a method by which you trace an idea or topic both forward and backward in time either by sources that have cited a particular work or through the references that a particular work has cited. This can be done with books and scholarly articles. 
There are two types of citation chaining that you can use:
Backward Chaining
Backward chaining involves looking at a published work's references to find other material that covers similar topics.
Forward Chaining
Forward chaining involves researching the sources that have cited a particular work to find more recent material covering similar topics.
Forward Chaining
Forward chaining is more complicated than backward chaining and requires more steps.
Google Scholar is a great choice for conducting this kind of chaining. While Google Scholar is in no way the only location this information can be found, it is by far the easiest to access.
To use Google Scholar follow the these steps: To begin, search for your item in Google Scholar using words from the title, the author, etc. (In the example below, I am searching the article title).
Beneath each result, you will see a link that says 'Cited by ...' and a number. Look carefully, as there may be more than one result matching your search.
Clicking on "Cited by ..." will bring up a list of citing documents in Google Scholar. These are arranged with the most highly cited works at the top. To locate a copy of these works, you can look for [PDF] links on the right, or links to Find it @ BGSU to the right or below each citation.
Resources that cite your article
- will be newer than the article you've already found
- will help you identify more recent, relevant research