As one of you mentioned in your interview assignment discussion, some medical professionals refer to "Dr. Google" for health research. I want to advise extreme caution when using google for professional research for 2 reasons: there is a lot of bad information on the free web, and google does not offer the kinds of specialized filters that we can find in health specific databases like PubMed and Cochrane.

However, there is a feature in Google Scholar (Scholar.google.com) that can be very useful for what is called "citation chaining"

Citation chaining, sometimes referred to as snowballing, is the practice of looking at the bibliography of one article to find other, related articles. The logic behind this practice is that if an author cites an article in their paper, both papers will discuss a related topic. Typically, a citation also lends credibility to the article that it is citing. So, generally, articles that are cited by lots of other articles are considered to have more impact and to be more credible than articles that are cited by comparatively fewer articles (though sometimes articles don't receive many citations because they are on obscure topics, or they are new).

In short, if you've found an article that is very important for your research, looking at the other articles that it cites, or the articles that cites it, is a good way of finding other useful sources of information.

Google Scholar provides a feature that makes that process easier. If you put the author or title of an article in the search box, the result for that article (or book) will have a link that says "cited by".

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When you click on the cited by link, it pulls up a list of the articles that cite the original article:

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As we discussed in class, PubMed also has this function. If an article has received a citation from a another article that is indexed in PubMed Central, then it will be listed within the record of an individual article in the right hand column of related articles:

pubmed cited by-1.PNG

You can also use PubMed Central to find information about articles that are cited within an article that you are looking at. Within the record for an article, if you scroll down to the references, you'll find hyperlinks that you can click on to get to more information (and sometimes the full text) of the articles cited within that article.

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Not every article is captured by either Pubmed or Google Scholar, so, if you have a really excellent article, it is worth fining the citation for it in both PubMed and Google Scholar to look at articles that it cites, and articles that are cited by it.