Getting Started in Grad School: 4.6 Extending Your Research

As part of your literature review, you will begin to identify some seminal works and major scholars in your field. You can use these core authors and publications as foundations to further build upon or extend your research.

There are various tools and techniques you can add to your research toolkit for discovering the interconnectedness between and amongst your core research references. Implementing these citation practices enables you to take a wider and deeper analysis and discover new research you might not find using other search methods. 

By adopting specific citation tracking strategies, you will be able to expand on and extend your research references to discover new sources and explore avenues for further exploration.

Reference tracking, also known as citation mining or snowballing, is a skill that is often used by expert searchers to extend their literature search. Simply put, this is a technique where one finds additional relevant articles based on citation information from one relevant, or 'seed' article. 

Why is this important?
Citation tracking assists you in seeing the shape of the scholarly conversation that has taken place over time in your specific research area. The seed article you are using to search from is a single point in time. Reference tracking allows you to go back in time (to examine earlier articles cited by your seed article) and into the future (to review articles that have cited your seed article since it has been published). This practice allows you to situate your one seed article into the larger research landscape and to find additional relevant references.

Watch part of the video, Overview of Search Techniques, that discusses the technique of citation searching / snowballing (note: the relevant section ends at 5:52).

Backward Searching > check the bibliography of your seed article (book, chapter, report) to discover new research and see which resources the author consulted to do their research. This will help you discover who influenced their work and how they interpreted, accepted, or refuted previous research. 

Forward Searching > find new information sources by determining who cited your seed article. This will help you discover how your original article potentially shaped or influenced future research and if, and how, other researchers have interpreted, accepted, or refuted the previous research. You will also likely find additional relevant research by scanning these new references.

Literature mapping tools are software that automates the backward and forward process of citation tracking. These tools use various techniques like data mining, natural language processing, and visualization to help identify relevant publications, analyze content, and uncover connections between studies. 

Citation-based literature mapping tools typically take one or more seed papers or citations as a starting point and suggest additional relevant papers with similar content, themes, or citations.  

There are many different literature mapping tools out there:  

• Research Rabbit: identifies similar papers related to your seed reference. Research Rabbit displays connected papers as a network analysis map or in a timeline view.  You can also sync Research Rabbit with your Zotero account.  Here is a detailed 2021 review of the Research Rabbit software.
• Litmaps: "generates a map of the most relevant articles that relate to your seed paper. The most recent articles appear on the right, the most cited articles appear at the top and the lines show the citations in-between" (source).
• Connected Papers: creates graphs based on the level of similarities or strong connections to the seed reference (more information on how it works).
• Inciteful: "consists of two different tools: Paper Discovery builds a network of papers from citations, uses network analysis algorithms to analyze the network, and gives you the information you need to quickly get up to speed on that topic. Literature Connector is intended for interdisciplinary scholars trying to bridge two domains, and allows you to enter two papers to give you an interactive visualization showing you how they are connected by the literature" (source).

Macquarie University Library has a comparison chart of these tools.  You may be interested in reviewing Texas A&M University Libraries' AI-Based Literature Review Tools guide (please note the disclaimer on this guide).

It can get overwhelming with having to search in various places to discover new research in your field of study. To help stay on top of new research, sign up to receive alerts while you are searching in your favourite databases or Google Scholar, or browsing a publisher's website.

Watch this video to learn how to save your database search and set up an alert so you are notified once new references are added that match your saved search criteria. While this video is specific to the Web of Science database, most databases offer this alert service.

You can also sign-up for notifications when new issues are published from your favourite scholarly journals. Visit the publisher's websites and look for the option to sign-up for email alerts.

In addition to search alerts, you can also stay on top of the newest developments in your field by following the scholarly conversation via social media posts/feeds from: 

• Individual scholars or labs
• Major professional organizations
• Top journals
• Academic departments, institutes, and research centers
• Conference/event hashtags