Explore: Citation Trail

Later this week, we’ll be starting a month-long trial of some new functionality in Explore. The Citation Trail is intended to improve resource discovery for users by making it possible to look up an article’s citations/cited-by information without leaving Explore – probably a familiar process for anyone who has used Web of Science or Google Scholar.

How does it work?

On some article-level results, the two buttons highlighted below will appear:

Selecting the ‘Citations’ button will return a list of articles cited by the first article:

Selecting the ‘Cited by’ button will return a list of articles that cite the first article:

For a better idea of how it’ll look in action, see this short video from Ex Libris.

Things to note: 

• The list of citations/citing articles may not be complete – this functionality is not intended to replace subject-specific, bibliographic databases and shouldn’t be relied upon for comprehensive literature searching. There will be a note about this at the top of the results screen, which we can re-word or emphasise as necessary
• We may not have full-text access to all results returned by following the citation trail – please encourage users to check the full-text indicator highlighted in the screenshot above. For these results, clicking the ‘Services’ tab will redirect the user to an SFX page with links to ILL services and union catalogues
• The citation buttons will only appear for some article-level, online content
• The citation data itself comes from CrossRef – more information about how it is generated can be found here

We’ll be calling for feedback about this feature in mid-August, but if you have any thoughts/questions/suggestions before that or would like to pass along any user comments, please do so by emailing digital-library-support@ucl.ac.uk.