Citation searching
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520410570580 |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
| Pages | 454-460 |
| Author | Péter Jacsó |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Savvy searching
Citation searching
Pe
´ter Jacso
´
The author
Pe
´ter Jacso
´is a Professor at the University of Hawaii, Manoa,
Hawaii, USA.
Keywords
Text retrieval, Search engines, Electronic journals, Databases
Abstract
Citation searching has been available for decades, although in a
limited form. This article discusses the advantages and
limitations of searching by cited references, and also some
alternatives in searching for cited references, before presenting a
case study involving citation searching in full-text indexes.
Electronic access
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is
available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
These days, savvy searching increasingly means
citation searching. This search technique has been
available for decades but was limited to legal
databases and citation databases of the Institute
for Scientific Information (ISI). The phenomenal
success of Google, which ranks search results by
the combination of the number of links a site or
page received and the PageRank of the citing
sources from where the links originate, brought the
concept of citation searching to the forefront.
Linking on the web is essentially the high-tech
digital version of the intellectual act of citing –
except for the purely financially motivated and
sociopath links.
Some online information services offer
sophisticated features for searching by cited
authors, cited journal name, cited article title,
cited year and their combinations. Others just offer
a single index of cited references, pouring all the
components of cited references into a large bucket
of keywords. Yet others may have an ill-
implemented search engine for citation searching
or do not make cited references searchable even
though they appear as distinct parts in a
publisher’s archive, not realizing the power of
citation searching to complement the traditional
search methods of searching by controlled
vocabulary terms and/or free text.
The case for searching by cited references
In an earlier column (Jacso
´, 2003) I have discussed
the pros and cons of thesaurus-based searching,
and the often less than user-friendly and
sometimes careless and/or incompetent
implementation of the thesauri on the host
software. Free-text searching in natural language
style has been made popular by Google, and to a
lesser extent by other web-wide search engines.
These, however, do not offer a panacea for
searching digital archives of full-text journal
articles and conference papers. They do not yet
make any use of the tagged structure of the
documents, which would allow limiting the result
to those documents which have the terms
matching the query in the abstract, among the
author-assigned keywords, or in the cited
references, instead of merely appearing somewhere
in the full text in an AND relationship.
The potential of tracing references cited in
scholarly articles was argued for convincingly 50
years ago (Garfield, 1955), but it took a long time
to get it into the mainstream of information
retrieval. Testscomparing results of searches using
thesaurus terms versus tracing cited and citing
references of seminal articles concluded that there
was no significant overlap in the result of
Online Information Review
Volume 28 · Number 6 · 2004 · pp.454-460
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520410570580
454
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