Fred StutzmanThoughts about information, social networks, and privacy

One of my favorite features in Google Scholar is its “cited by” function.  Cited by allows you to see all of the items in Google Scholar that cite the pulbication you were searching for.  In comparison to Web of Science, GS has much greater recall, which is useful when you’re investigating a new topic.

The problem with GS cited by is that there is no easy means for searching within the results.  This is fine if your publication is cited only a few times and you can eyeball the results.  But as the citation count scales up, being able to search within the results becomes pretty important.

The good news is that you can search within GS cited by, it just requires a little URL hacking.  In my case, I was looking for publications about web surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book “The Media Equation.”  We’ll do this step by step:

1. Open up GS, and search for “The Media Equation“
2. The first result is the Reeves and Nass book.  Click on the “Cited by 1598” link.
3. The URL will look something like this:

   http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&cites=12773235514158955901

   You will want to select that list bit, the “&cites=12773235514158955901″.

4. Now, open up GS in a new tab and run a search for “Web Survey.”
5. Finally, paste the “&cites=12773235514158955901″ onto the end Web Survey URL, so it looks something like this:

   http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=Web+Survey&btnG=Search&cites=12773235514158955901

6. Voila!  You’ve found the 337 publications matching Web Surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book.  The first one looks like a very promising publication from some highly regarded methodologists.  Win!

I was unable to run a comparison in the WoS database as it doesn’t seem to know about the Reeves and Nass book.  Are there any other places you use for Cited By searches (i.e. other databases, vendors, search engine hacks)?  And if there is some easy way to do this search in the GS interface, please let me know.  I’ve read the advanced searching docs and researched this, but it doesn’t appear there is a simple way to search within citations.