[mikece]

What would be the best alternative to Wikipedia at getting a list of citations on a topic quickly? For academic research I consider the content of the page as "Yeah, maybe" but the citations to be more useful in terms of digging to deeper sources faster. The argument could be made that the ability of almost anyone to edit Wikipedia is a form of peer review but for edge topics it's tough to tell who has the chops to be editing a page and who doesn't.

[corrral]

> What would be the best alternative to Wikipedia at getting a list of citations on a topic quickly?

If you're looking for major/important sources to read on a topic, not just a quick way to halfway-fake a works-cited section, I've found it valuable to locate some representative, recent academic book in the field and read the author's introduction and other pre-chapter-1 material. These will often include a lot of name-dropping of what are considered major works in the field. There may also be a list of abbreviations the book will use, and those often include several major works in the field that'll come up often in the body text.

That's your list of books and papers to find and read. Repeat that technique with each of those books and papers, too, if you want to keep going deeper.

Often you can get enough off an Amazon or Google preview of a book for this to work. Plus, libraries exist, and you pull that kind of information out of several books (which can be handy—anything that appears more than once deserves special attention) in less than an hour, without checking anything out. And there's always Library Genesis, which may not have every book but probably has at least one in your interest area that can be mined in this way.

Wikipedia's sort of useful for this, at least for tracking down a first work to attack with this approach, but the problem is that many articles don't cite highly-regarded or authoritative or landmark works on the topic, so much as whatever the author(s) happened to have handy or what was easiest to find online (a whole hell of a lot of great information is still not available on the Web, even in 2022, including material in very recent books, not just pre-Web ones, or is available on the Web but only in poorly- or not-indexed-by-web-search-engines under-copyright ebooks).

[jacobolus]

The most useful tool is the academic citation graph, e.g. via Google Scholar.

Start with a couple keywords. Click through the "cited by n" links on the top few papers. For papers that don’t have PDFs freely available, find DOIs and put them into Sci-hub. Books can often be found at the Internet Archive, Google Books, or libgen. At the start, skim skim skim.

Look at what links forward and backward from the papers you see. Hunt for new keywords to try. Go a few hops all around the graph. It often doesn’t take too long to get a rough lay of the land.

[stevenjgarner]

Academic citation graphs are invaluable WHERE the topic is academic, but this post (like most citations I would venture to say) is an example of citing Wikipedia that would generally not be considered academic or in the results of the articles and case law of scholar.google.com.

There is a huge body of knowledge that lies (dare I say) in a Google search. You just need to know how to evaluate the search results with a reasonable criteria of notability, relevance, accuracy, etc.

[corrral]

Thanks for the reminder—I often forget about Google's various less-prominent tools and services.

[DiggyJohnson]

Very well said, I'm writing a book (popular narrative non-fiction) and the research process has led me to the exact same conclusion. Find a couple "pinnacle" books related to the domain/subject/question you're interested in, and read the Preface, Introduction, Ch. 1, etc. This is often the only place in a book authors are candid enough to directly answer the question of "why am I writing this and how does it relate to what other's have done?"

No shade intended, if anything I need to work on this style. I'm too nervous of making it sound like other people's ideas are my own, but then I end up writing a block of defensive-sounding citation & qualification, and nobody wants to read that...

Anyways, well said.

[wrp]

Academic journal articles may be more convenient, because they usually focus on the key citations for a field in the brief literature review. Use Google Scholar to find some, then download from Sci-Hub.

[stevenjgarner]

Don't forget to search on https://news.ycombinator.com/ !

[bonoboTP]

Usually you can find survey/review articles, or textbooks and look at what they cite. You can also try to find websites of research groups in the area with good reputations and check out their recent works and the citations therein. Especially works that you see multiple times using this approach will be important core works, from which you can go further. General Google searches and Google Scholar keyword searches and exploring the citation graph are also useful.

[pcrh]

Wikipedia may be a good start if you're completely clueless about a topic. But, academically-speaking, it doesn't last long. You're not going to be able to produce anything more insightful than a fresher's last minute sunday night essay using wikipedia.

[asdff]

It depends on your field, but most fields publish review articles. These are written by a single author or two in the field, and perform no new analysis beyond just listing all the current info about the field. Here is an example for oncology, this one is periodically republished every few years as more info is learned by the field:

https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/12/1/31/675...