SOC 681: Quantitative and Survey Research Methods (Menning)

In the course of your research you might wish to determine what articles have become particularly important within the scholarship about your research topic. Social Sciences Citation Index, a database listed on the "Searching for peer-reviewed articles" page of this guide (and which is actually one component of a larger database called Web of Science) excels at this task. 

The search interface looks much like those encountered in other databases. Click "add row" to add text boxes to the page. Enter your search terms into separate boxes, leaving the adjacent pull-down menus set to "topic." 

Near the top of your results page, just above the articles, are a number of options for sorting the results. Clicking "times cited" will rank the results according to how many times they have been cited by other articles in Social Sciences Citation Index. The articles that have been cited the most are presumably those that have had the greatest impact. 

The number of times an article has been cited appears to its right on the results list. Also to the right of each article, as well as available as a sorting option, is the "usage count" of each article. Usage counts report the number of times a Social Science Citation Index user - at Ball State or elsewhere - has accessed the full text of the article at the publisher's website or saved the article to a citation management tool (e.g. EndNote). Usage counts are another metric of article impact. 

When you click an article's title in Social Sciences Citation Index you are linked to a page with more information about that article, as in other databases. On the right side of that page the "times cited" number for the article appears again, and below it a "cited references" number. "Times cited," again, represents the number of times the article in question has been cited by other articles in Social Sciences Citation Index. "Cited References" represents the number of articles in SSCI were cited by the article in question. 

Both numbers are clickable and allow you to engage in what is called "citation chaining" - moving backward and forward in time along the series of articles that cited or were cited by the article you begin with. Clicking the "cited by" number allows you to move forward in time, displaying a list of articles that cited the one you were just looking at. You can click those articles and see how many times they have been cited themselves, and by what subsequent articles. Conversely, you can click an article's "cited references" number to move backward in time, displaying older articles and discovering the knowledge upon which the article you were examining was built. In this way, citation chaining allows you to see relationships between articles. 

It's important to note when citation chaining and when looking for highly cited articles that Social Sciences Citation Index is a collection of information like every other database, and decisions were made about what to include and what not to include. SSCI does not, nor does any other database, abstract and index every article ever published. While the article impact metrics and citation chaining features are very useful, you must understand that they do not necessarily capture every time a given article was cited by another article. 

Scholarly articles often contain a literature review section that recapitulates articles that constitute the body of knowledge upon which the authors began their own research. Another strategy for identifying important articles about your research topic is to be alert to whether any articles are appearing repeatedly in the literature reviews of the articles you're gathering. 

As you begin to craft your own literature review from the articles you have gathered, you might begin to ask yourself how the articles fit together as a body of knowledge. One suggestion for this phase of your assignment is to review the conclusions sections of the articles you've found to determine the extent to which they ultimately agree or disagree.