Q. How can I find more recent articles on a similar topic?

Follow citations

Other researchers may have read the article you have read and cited it in their own, more recent, articles. You can find articles that have cited the original article in the abstract databases Scopus and Web of Science. These databases don’t contain the full text of any article but there are links out to other databases to get full text, where available.

In Scopus:

To search for a specific paper, type the title of the article in the search box. If details of the article are included in the database, you'll see it in the list of results. The far right column of the results list indicates how many times the article has been cited. Clicking on this number will give a list of these citing articles. Some of these articles might also have citations – you can follow the chain of research forward in time. Click on the title to read the abstract and see a clickable list of references (useful for going further back down the chain of research), or click on 'AL Link to Full Text' to get a link to where we have the article in another database (if we subscribe to it).

Scopus and Web of Science contain articles in high quality journals. There is some overlap between them so some articles will be included in both databases. Citation information is also included in search results on Google Scholar, where the number of citations is likely to be higher due to the citations being anywhere, not just in quality academic journals.

This topic is covered in detail in the Citation Searching LibSmart workshop, run every term.  Check the LibSmart calendar for details of of the next workshop on this topic, or contact Alice Cann for access to the slides.

Read other articles by the author

The authors may have developed their research and written more over time. Search online to see if an author has a profile on their university’s website, listing all their publications. Or use search by author name in a database – Web of Science, Scopus, or another database specific to your subject area.

Search by keyword effectively

Ensure that you have done some planning, think about all words that might be relevant and use search tools in databases to get good recent results. Most lists of results are initially sorted by relevance, but you can also sort them in other ways, e.g. by date. Further details can be found in the "Using Databases" section of the "Finding Resources" Library Guide.