The ability to link forward and backward through the literature and to discover relationships among the articles through shared references is critical to determining the interconnections among various disciplines. Because citation searching can become somewhat complex, ISI Citation Databases provide extensive online help features. Only the first author of a cited reference may be searchable. If the original paper is included in the portion of the database available, then all cited authors are searchable. Allow for variations in spelling and use of initials in author names and for incomplete or inaccurate references to the same articles.
Disciplines vary in the degree of importance attributed to cited references.