Google Scholar’s citation searching capability has recently become much more useful by allowing a search within cited articles.
The searching of cited references has long been a technique that information professionals use for subject searching. We can discover recent articles of interest by finding those articles that have cited an older relevant paper, using citation indexes such as Scisearch in Dialog. Citation analysis is also used in academia to determine statistically the impact of an article or author.
In the free Internet arena, Google Scholar is one of the systems with the ability to do citation searching. Many articles found with Google Scholar have a ‘cited by’ link that leads to articles which have cited that article.
As an example, you have a copy of an article that is on target for your purpose, but is 2 decades old: “Effects of population structure on DNA fingerprint analysis in forensic science”. Clicking on ‘Related articles’ finds more articles on the topic, but clicking on ‘Cited by 39’ provides still more.
Google Scholar‘s newest feature provides the additional capability of searching within those cited articles for more precision. One useful application of this is in finding information about a particular technique. Answer the questions: “How has that technique been used?” “Has it been used for …?”
The following paper describes a procedure for extracting DNA: “Chelex 100 as a medium for simple extraction of DNA for PCR-based typing from forensic material”. It was cited by 3051 articles in Google Scholar and many of these articles are studies in which this technique was used. But 3051 are far too many articles to scroll through. Now, with this new feature, it is possible to search within those results for a particular area of interest by clicking the box “Search within articles citing…”. Adding the search term “bone” results in 305 articles that may have used that technique to extract DNA from bone.
Another option is to create an alert for articles citing a particular paper so that an email notification is received whenever Google Scholar adds an article citing that paper. Click on the “Cited by…” link for the paper of interest, and then the envelope icon.
