11.2.3 Follow up on key publications in the field

Your literature review will allow you discover seminal publications in the field. These could be publications that are highly cited or publications that deal with exactly the topic you are interested in. Of course you will want to ensure that you also study papers that have cited this seminal piece of work. They will often show up in your initial search, but if they look at the phenomenon from a different angle and dont refer to the exact some concepts, they will not be captured. How to follow up on publications that cite your seminal publications?

A future version of Publish or Perish will implement an option to display citing publications within Publish or Perish when double-clicking on the original publications. However, at this stage double-clicking on the publication in question in Publish or Perish leads you to Google Scholar which lists the citing works. The screenshot below shows the first two citing works.

The first two of the citing articles already occurred in our earlier search. However, the second two did not. The short summary of the article provides a quick way to assess whether it is worthwhile to follow up on these articles. Google Scholar has recently implemented a new feature, which allows you to search within citing articles. We will implement this feature in a future version of PoP, so you have the choice to do this search within Publish or Perish. The advantage of this is that it enables to sort the results in any possible way.

However, at this stage you can still benefit from this feature by using the Google Scholar interface. Let's assume we want to establish which papers referring to Knight & Cavusgil deal with New Zealand. I would then enter “New Zealand” in the search box and click the “Search within articles citing Knight: the born …”. The screenshot below shows the first four results.