Perusing the literature via citation links

While MEDLINE searching is recognized as the single most effective means to identify relevant items to solve clinical and research problems, the clinician should also consider the complementary strategy to search for relevant items citing a known key paper. This study reports on the usefulness of citation searching based on the analysis of 89 searches. For each topic, the citations linked to an average of 24% additional relevant materials. At least one relevant item was added to 85% of the searches. The additional effort of scanning another printout is minimal since citation searching for 42% of the searches produced less than 7 additional items, half of which were judged to be useful. Duplicate retrievals were mostly of definite relevance. This alternate strategy appeared to be effective in interdisciplinary topics. Furthermore, the online version of the citation index is known for short turn-around time in processing, a feature important for many rapidly developing specialties.