Classifying sources

Assessing sources

Frequently cited literature is important for the academic debate. For this reason, you should include it in your own work. However, less frequently cited literature should not be ignored. Recent publications, for instance, have a smaller number of citations as they raise in the course of time. In principle, also less frequently cited literature should be assessed whether they bring added value to your own work as the number of citations could not be considered as factor per se for estimating the quality of a source.

In the case that scholars cited publications of other scholars in their publications, this is called citation chain. Those chains may serve at finding other relevant literature regarding a topic. You may establish citation chains, based on a publication, in a prospective (onwards) or retrospective (backwards) way:

• The prospective search for citations chains asks the question: By whom this publication was already cited? For finding that out, several so-called citation databases are available (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar), enabling to find out how frequent and by whom a publication was already cited. The publications found during that are then more current than the basic publication.
• The retrospective search for citation chains asks the question: Whom this publication has already cited? For finding that out, you use the references and the list of references of this publication guiding you to the literature cited. By their list of references you may trace back the way to older literature up to one or several primary sources.