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ANTH3871: Anthropology Senior Seminar

This guide offers resources and research approaches for students working on an Anthropology senior research project.

Databases for Articles in Related Research Fields

Using Citations and Notes to Trace a Scholarly Conversation

Nearly every scholarly text has references that can serve as pathways to related research. 

You can use these strategies to trace a conversation both "backward" and "forward" in time, using a source you have found. 

To go "back" in time, finding sources that informed a scholarly text, check for clues of references in the text, usually in the bibliography, endnotes, footnotes, or works cited sections. You can use this bibliographic information to find a "known" source, by trying out a search in CLIO or Google Scholar.

To go "forward" in time (from the time of a text's publication), you might use a tool like Google Scholar to find examples of texts that have cited a particular source. To do this, perform a search for the source in question (by title or author should usually work). Then within the Google Scholar record, look for the link that reads: "Cited by ___." (this will show the number of sources that have cited the source you are looking at). Click on this link, and you'll find a list of citing sources. You can narrow down this list by doing a keyword search within it, for example, if you want to look at sources that have cited Geertz's "Thick Decription" and mention decolonization, try a keyword search with the word decolonization (or, to expand, decoloni*).