Doing Your Literature Review

You can use the reference list of an article or book to find related literature (snowball method). 

When you have a list of publications, for example after performing a topic search in Scopus or Web of Science, this citation information helps you to identify key publications (as measured by the number of citations received) and other potentially relevant publications:

• You can sort the results by 'Times Cited'.
• You can create a Citation Report [Web of Science] or Citation Overview [Scopus], which shows the total number of citations received and the number of citations received per year. This can help to identify articles that have received a lot of citations in the past and articles that have recently started to gather citations.
• You can get create a list of the citing articles (not just the number of citing articles, but the titles, authors etc.) and analyse this list - for example: which authors cite publications about this topic? Is their research important for your topic? Which journals published them?

Click on the picture to enlarge it.
Example of a Citation Map, created in Web of Science. On the left hand you find the reference list of the article in the middle (Zwaan, R. A. (2014). Embodiment and language comprehension: Reframing the discussion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,18(5), 229-234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.02.008) and on the right hand the articles citing Zwaan's article (at the time this picture was made, the article has more citations now).  [Unfortunately, the Citation Map feature has been retired by Web of Science, it is no longer possible to create a citation map.]