• Identify one or more articles that are highly relevant to your topic.
• Use these articles to practice additional discovery.

Having a few relevant articles to begin with can be hugely helpful in developing a literature search. You can use these to:

• Connect you to related articles through citation chasing
• Reveal vocabulary you can use to expand your search terms
• Test your search strategy to make sure it is retrieving relevant articles

All of the resources recommended for topic discovery include options for finding related articles by allowing you to search the citation landscape connected to individual articles. If you find a highly relevant article, it can be useful to look at the reference list and also to see if anyone else has cited that article. 

Citation Indexes such as Scopus and Web of Science also include robust options for cited reference searching. See Where to Search for more information. 

If you find an article that is highly relevant to your topic, consider reviewing the references list for additional articles.

• Scroll down to “References” within an article record. Each reference will include a PubMed link that you can follow to find the referenced article.

• Some records will also include PubMed links to other articles that have cited them.

PubMed's “find similar articles” feature in an article’s record will pull up a list of related articles. This list is algorithmically generated based on the title, abstract, and MeSH terms of given articles.