Cited Reference Searching & Journal Rankings: JSTOR

How to locate articles and other documents that have cited a previously published document. Also how to determine where a journal is ranked in relation to others in its field.

What 's in JSTOR

JSTOR is an interdisciplinary archive of over 1,000 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Keep in mind:

Extent of coverage varies by discipline: humanities disciplines are generally covered more extensively than social science and considerably more than most science disciplines.  Never-the-less, due to the interdisciplinary nature of research, this is a source that would be useful for most fields.

Years of coverage varies by publication and generally excludes the most current 3 to 5 years so you will not locate the most recent cites of a publication.

JSTOR

Though not a 'citation' database, it is possible to search JSTOR for citing articles using two methods: Citation Locator or Advanced Search . To search by either method, begin by using the Search pull-down menu to select the desired search method.  The following examples demonstrate searching the same article both ways.

Citation Locator Method

Step 1. On the Citation Locator search page, enter title and author information. Select the Journal from the drop-down list and click Search

Step 2. In the results, click on the article title or the Item Information link.

Step 3. If other articles in JSTOR cite the title of interest, the JSTOR box in the right column will include this link: 'N' Items Citing this Item, in this case 6 JSTOR items cite the Foner article. Click on this link to view the list of citing documents. The Google Scholar box includes links to citing articles in that source (caution, not all of these links work).

Step 4. Click on the #Items Citing this Item link to view citing documents. A link to the Google Scholar also appears here.

Advanced Search Method:

Unfortunately, the Citation Locator Method of searching can miss relevant results. A more comprehensive but also time-consuming method is to conduct an Advanced Search. Select Advanced Search from the Search drop-down menu.

Step 1.  On the Advanced Search page enter the article title enclosed in quotation marks. Full-text searching will search in-text references, notes, footnotes and article bibliographies.  It is important to enter as much of the title as possible to distinguish it from other similar titles.

Step 2.  The number of results found is often higher, in this case it found 22 potential citing documents. Some of these may not be citations to the original article. See next step.

Step 3.  Click on the Page of First Match link for each citation to quickly identify if this is a cite to the desired publication. The following example of the second citation in the list above is referring to a speech by the author, not the article by the author.

Example of a citation referring to a speech by the author, not the article by the author