How To Find Seminal Articles

What are Seminal Works

Seminal works, sometimes called pivotal or landmark studies, are articles that initially presented an idea of groovy importance or influence within a item discipline. Seminal articles are referred to time and fourth dimension once more in the research, so y'all are likely to see these sources oftentimes cited in other journal articles, books, dissertations, etc.

In order for a piece of work to be considered seminal, it should have led to:

a much higher level of agreement in the field, and/or
a paradigm shift, and/or
an entirely new research area

Identifying seminal articles relies heavily on your own thoroughness in the examination and synthesis of the scholarly literature. Typically, there will non be any explicit labels placed on articles, identifying them as seminal. Rather, yous will brainstorm to see the same authors or articles cited frequently.It is important to keep in mind that seminal studies may have been published quite some time ago. Limiting a database search to only the past 5 years, for example, may exclude seminal studies from your results. To avoid overlooking pivotal inquiry that may have occurred in years past, it is recommend that you exercise not use a engagement limiter, at to the lowest degree at offset

How to Notice Seminal Works

Although identification of seminal inquiry volition occur as you progress in your research, at that place are additional resources that may exist used to assistance y'all visualize the evolution of research over time, and to place possible seminal works. These resource and search techniques are described beneath.

Highly Cited - A source has been cited in many other works is i indication that a particular source is seminal. A number of our databases provide this data. For example, when searching in Scopus, you can sort by "Cited by (highest)"

Note, though, that although all seminal articles will be highly cited, not all highly cited articles are necessarily seminal. In fact, the number of citations an article has received is non necessarily an indication of the article'south quality. An article may have been mentioned in many other articles considering information technology was especially problematic, for example; other authors may have pointed out bug with its methodology, conclusions, etc.

Google Scholar allows you to search across many disciplines and types of scholarly sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other websites.

Like other databases, Google Scholar likewise identifies how many times a particular source has been cited. This will be displayed beneath the abstract/excerpt or bibliographic information, as shown beneath. Again, a high number of citing sources could indicate a seminal work.

Booksare generally more comprehensive than scholarly articles and dissertations and provide thorough overview of a particular topic or subject field. Books are likely to identify prominent researchers in the field, and to describe primal concepts and theories, or history and evolution of the field. Therefore, books may be a peachy place to find references to seminal inquiry. Look for chapters on background / history / theories /etc. Also, accept a await at thereferenceswhich may be included at the end of individual chapters, or at the end of the volume.

As an instance, the book What nosotros know near emotional intelligence: How it affects learning, piece of work, relationships, and our mental health, identifies Jack Mayer and Peter Salovey every bit conducting the first systematic research on the topic of emotional intelligence (EI) with Daniel Goleman bringing it to the mainstream through the publication of his volume in 1995.

References- As you perform literature searches on a topic and read the papers compare the reference lists of those sources. The items/authors that show upwardly repeatedly are probably key figures in the enquiry.