Review articles are a type of scholarly journal article that explore how scholars have understood and debated a broad topic over time.
Use review articles to:
• identify which scholars, books, articles (etc.) have made a major impact (within your discipline)
• see how scholars from different disciplines have approached the topic
Google Scholar or Web of Science let you sort search results by the number of times articles have been cited. This is one measure - an imperfect measure - of impact of a source. Why is it an imperfect measure? For one, notoriety doesn't necessarily mean quality. Also, the more recent an article, the lower the chances of it having been cited - academic articles take a while to be edited and published.
As you work on your research project, you'll notice that certain scholars' interests seem to line up more closely with your work than others. Finding who has cited these scholars' works can connect you with interesting and relevant research you might have otherwise missed. This can also be helpful for finding counter-arguments and alternative perspectives you might not have considered, since scholars often cite works so as to explain how they disagree with them.
Use Google Scholar or Web of Science to find a relevant resource and then see which later texts cite the one with which you start, sometimes called "cited reference searching."
