Citation Searching - Page 1
The idea of citation searching is to start with a known author who has written major works on the topic you are interested in. You then use a database called Web of Science to find out who has cited (or quoted) that work since it was published.
In theory, if a scholar is quoting another author's works they are likely to be writing in the same subject area.
Web of Science is actually three databases: the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the Social Science Citation Index and the Science Citation Index. You can search them all at the same time.
Web of Science focuses on US journals published since 1985 (so Australian and international authors are not always mentioned).
If you need to do citation searching for the years before 1985, use the printed volumes of Arts & Humanities Citation Index (Fisher Reference 011 65, 1975-1984) and the Social Science Citation Index (Fisher Reference 300.16 36, 1966-1985).
For example, if you want to know who has cited:
Colin Renfrew's book The emergence of civilisation: the Cyclades and the Aegean in the third millennium B.C. since it was published in 1972, you would connect to the Web of Science.