Locating sources in humanities scholarship: The efficacy of following bibliographic references

Humanities scholars often locate literature sources by following bibliographic references from documents already known to them or to their colleagues. In contrast, they tend not to make regular use of formal bibliographic (for example, abstracting and indexing) tools. The soundness of this approach resides in the scholars' familiarity with the literature of their specialization, the role of the literature-especially primary sources-in humanities scholarship, the importance of peer influence, and vocabulary softness in the humanities. An evaluation of the humanist's preferred approach, based on following bibliographic references from documents known to be relevant to twelve scholarly humanities questions, revealed that the approach complements, and in some ways surpasses, more formal approaches by identifying relevant literature not covered by standard bibliographic tools and by providing a more appropriate level of analytical access than the formal bibliographic apparatus. The following of bibliographic references depends critically, however, on the identification of appropriate source documents.