How to Use an Article to Find More Sources

A useful article can lead you to even more good sources if you know where to look. Here are some simple strategies that work for almost every research situation.
Transcript:
Hi, my name is Sarah. I’m a librarian at Gorgas Library. In this video, I’m going to show you how you can use information from a scholarly article to help you find more resources on your topic.
Once you’ve found a good article on your research topic, you have a lot of information at your fingertips to help you find more.
Start by looking up the author with an author search in Scout. For the author of this article, I’ve found another scholarly article, a book review, and two books that all relate to culture and the environment, and even more scholarly articles on the next page.
You can also look up the journal the article was published in, and search or browse for related articles. Use the E-Journals link on the front page of the UA Libraries website to search for the journal title. From there, you can search within the journal.
With any scholarly article, you can use the author’s research to help guide your own. Look through the reference list and note any articles that look relevant to your project. You should be able to pull them up with a title search in Scout. If we don’t have something you’re looking for, you can always request it through interlibrary loan.
Finally, if an article is more than a year or two old, you can use Google Scholar to find articles that list it in their references.
Go to Google Scholar and paste the article citation into the search bar. Underneath the article listing, click the linkthat says “cited by.” From here, you can browse articles that have cited the one you found. If there are more than a few, use the check box at the top of the page to search within the ones you’ve found.
And that’s how you can use the information in one article to help you find more sources for your research. Check out the video description for links to tutorials on the tools I discussed, and call, text, email, or chat with us if you need help!