Citation chaining is the process by which you use one good information source, such as an article relevant to your topic and discover, by viewing reference or cited by lists. Citation chaining allows you to identify key authors, publications, and journals in your area of study and can give insight into the scholarly conversation surrounding your research topic. 

Backward citation chaining involves involves looking at a published work's references to find other material that covers similar topics. 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.

Forward citation chaining involves discovering the sources that have cited a particular work to find more recent material covering similar topics. There are now several databases listed below that are really useful for forward citation chaining.

Please note: citation chaining should be used in conjunction with database searching. Exclusively using citation chaining to locate resources can limit discovering other valuable research. Also, be aware that not all citations are created equal. Scholars draw on and engage with each other’s work in many ways. Some citations are are casually mentioned, while others are explored more deeply.

Citation Chaser 

Citation Chaser is a free tool for systematic backward ("References") and forward ("Citations") citation chaining. It searches the Lens.org database, which consists of PubMed, PubMed, PubMed Central, CrossRef, Microsoft Academic Graph, and CORE. You can input multiple PubMed Identifiers (PMID), PubMed Central Identifiers (PMCID), or Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) at one time. Then, based on the input articles, References and Citations lists are generated. Citation Chaser automatically deduplicates your results and unique records can be downloaded into an RIS file to import into a citation manager for screening.

To use Citation Chaser:

• Select the article input tab and paste your identifiers into the appropriate box.
  • Entries must be separated by a space, comma, or carriage return. 
• To find articles that have cited the articles you input, select the 'Citations' tab.
  • Click on  'Search for all cited references in Lens.org'. 
  • Choose 'Download an RIS file of referenced articles (including abstracts)'. 
• For sources listed in the articles' reference lists, select the 'References' tab.
  • Click on  'Search all referenced articles in Lens.org'. 
  • Choose 'Download an RIS file of referenced articles (including abstracts)'.

PubMed
Once you click on a relevant article:

• Scroll down to find "Cited by: articles
• Scroll down to find "Similar articles" that that share MeSH terms

Scopus
In the record page for each article:

• View the article's references as linked entries at the bottom of the page
• Access articles that cite the article by clicking "Cited by"
• Access articles that share sources listed in that article's reference list by clicking "Related Documents"

Google Scholar
For a relevant article in your search results:

• Access articles that cite the article as a source by clicking "Cited by“
• Access articles that share sources listed in that article's reference list by clicking "Related articles"

Web of Science
In the record page for each article:

• Access sources listed in the article's reference list by clicking "Cited References"
• Access articles that cite the article by clicking "Times cited"
• Access articles that share sources listed in that article's reference list by clicking "View Related Documents."