 When you do manage to find a few sources that are relevant to your research topic, it is often helpful to skim the reference list for other potentially relevant materials. Research builds on existing research, and by following the scholarly conversation through citations, you can find additional sources to inform your own research and grasp how scholars have collectively advanced our understanding of the topic. Reference searching can be especially helpful when you're having difficulty finding many relevant sources through database searches, perhaps because the topic can't easily be captured in a few concise keywords. It's often a great compliment to database searching. Instead of, or in addition to, skimming the reference list, you can have a look at the background or literature review sections of published papers. They can helpfully place some of the sources cited in the reference list in context and give you an idea of which sources have been especially influential. When you find a source you'd like to use, be sure to identify what kind of source it is before you go looking for it. It may be a government report that can be easily accessed through a hyperlink provided. If it's a book chapter, you should start by searching for the title of the book in Summon or the library catalog. In the case of journal articles, you can search for the article title in Summon or Google Scholar, and as a quick aside, if you do opt to use Google Scholar, be sure to access it through the library as you'll have more access to full text articles that way. You can also search for the journal title, not the article title, but the journal title, through our journal title search box. If you take this approach, you will need to note the volume, issue, and page numbers of the article you're looking for and drill down to find it. If we don't have the item you need, you can submit an interlibrary loan request. If you're not sure whether or not we have the item and need some help, don't hesitate to ask us. Consulting reference lists can be a great way to find additional relevant sources. However, they will necessarily be older than the source in which they're cited. That may be quite all right, but in some fields, currency is especially important, and you may be more interested in finding items published more recently. Fortunately, some search tools allow what we call cited or forward reference searching, searching for papers that have cited an item since it was published. These will necessarily be published more recently than the item in question. The large multidisciplinary database web of science allows one to perform this kind of search, as does Google Scholar. First, find the item and then click to see a list of the other items that cite it. Note that you can access the list of citing sources from web of science through some summon search results as well. Sited reference searching is less helpful when searching for a very recently published source, as it will not have had time to accrue many citations. Should you have any questions about reference searching, we're here to help.