How to use the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)

When you first click into the SSCI, you're given a choice between the easy search and the full search. First choose the easy search, then check the SSCI, and then choose either the topic or the person search. The topic search is very straightforward--just type in something like "Cuban missile crisis" and you're off and running. If you do a person search, you can either search for all articles about a person, by a person, or which cite works written by that person.

What do you do after you've done an easy search on a subject or a name and have generated a list of articles? Clicking into a particular article will give you not just information about that article and a link to all the sources cited in that article (some of which are in turn linked), but also a list of other articles in the database which share references with the target article. You get that list by clicking onto the "Related Records" button on the top right of the full listing for the target article. All of the articles listed there have full citations and links to take you to yet additional sources.

Most of these lists are markable. You select articles by clicking in the boxes on the left side of a particular list and then clicking the "submit" button at the bottom or the top of the page. You have to click "submit" for each page you see. To review your cumulative list--that is, all the listings you've submitted for all the pages you've gone through--click the "marked list" button at the top of the page. When you're in the marked list, you have four boxes you can click to save your list: "format for print," "save to file," "email" and "export." "Export" is for people using Pro-cite or Reference Manager. But don't think from that that people not using special software can get away easily by using one of the other commands. The "save to file" command, we are told, is "suitable for import by a bibliographical management software package." If you try saving it to a regular word processing file, it comes out in what I consider a minimally usable form. You're better off using "format to print," and then saving it (it's saved as a text file) and then calling it up with a program like Word.

I should warn you that there are, to my mind at least, a couple of problems with the easy search. The list of sources cited by a given article does not give titles for the articles included there--not even short titles--but just the name of the journal and volume in which the article appeared, along with date and page references. Some of the sources listed in the entry for the original article are linked, so for those at least you can get the title and full citation, but generally there are very few such links, even for articles which themselves are to be found elsewhere in the data base. So you can't do a simple triage based on title. The second problem is more minor: the list of sources that have cited the target article is often quite incomplete.

You can remedy these problems by going back and doing a full search. For this purpose, you might have to print out your original list (using first the "format to print" command), and indeed whatever lists you make up containing references you want to check. You then click the "cited ref search" button. You fill in the information you're asked to include--you don't have to include everything--and you should remember that in the case of articles, "cited work" refers to journal titles, not article titles. And you want to work in both directions.

First, to find a full list of all the articles that have cited your original target article, you do a full search for that particular work. A list will be generated, as a rule containing a number of boxes; you click all those boxes. You then do hit the "lookup" button. You're likely to get a lot more articles this way than if you did the easy search.

Second, you do a "cited ref search" for the specific articles that were cited in your original article--articles that you had no title for. You may still not get a title, although there's a very good chance you will, and in any event you'll get full references, including author and title, for all the articles in the database that cited that article.

In fact, for certain purposes you may want to just start with the full search, and never use the easy search at all.

This data base is a lot of fun to use, and if you don't watch out, you can get lost in a labyrinth of links and won't get out for hours.