In many (but not all) records for journal articles in OneSearch, you’ll find one or more red arrow icons that let you run a new search to find either records for the sources cited in that article or records for sources that have cited the article you’ve found. This ability to navigate in either direction along the chain of citations is similar to what you can do in Web of Science or in Google Scholar. While this feature will aid in the discovery of related items, if you’re looking for an authoritative and more comprehensive source of citation data, Web of Science is the place to go.
In the brief record display that you see in search results pages, some records will feature none of the icons, some will fill feature one of the icons, and others will have both. Here is a screenshot showing two records in the search results where one record has one icon and the other has both:
If you mouse over the icons, you’ll see tool tips that explain what each icon does:
- Icon with two arrows pointing up = “find sources citing this”
- Icon with one arrow pointing down = “find sources cited in this”
If you click through to the full record for journal article record, at the bottom of the page, you’ll see the icons repeated along with explanation of what each one does:
This page of documentation in the Ex Libris Knowledge Base explains where the citation data comes from and which citations are actually visible when you run searches using the citation trail icons:
Primo currently matches the metadata provided by CrossRef with the records in PC (Primo Central) to build the citation trails. Only records that belong to the collections that your institution has activated in PC will appear in the lists.