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Name a paper by title, author, or DOI and ask Anara to find the papers that cite it, the papers it cites, or related work in the same area. Anara searches a 240-million-paper index and returns a ranked list with abstracts and import options. For researchers tracing the influence of a finding or building a bibliography around a central study.

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1. Describe the task

A paper anchors your argument. You know it was published in 2012 and the field moved after it, but you do not know who responded, who built on it, and whether anyone has since challenged the core claim. Tracking this manually means chasing footnotes across dozens of papers, most of which you do not have. Anara can trace the citation graph for you. Give it a paper by title, author, or DOI and ask for the papers that cited it, the papers it cited, or work related to it by topic. Anara searches across 240 million scholarly works and returns results with titles, abstracts, publication years, and a direct path to import the ones you want. Here a doctoral student in political sociology is working on a chapter about democratic backsliding and wants to find every significant paper that has cited Levitsky and Ziblatt’s 2018 work since its publication. 
Find the papers that have cited Levitsky and Ziblatt's "How Democracies Die" (2018). Return the 20 most-cited works that cite it, with the publication year, title, authors, and a one-sentence description of how each paper engages with their argument. Focus on peer-reviewed articles rather than books or reports.

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2. Give Anara context

Required context
  • The paper you want to trace. A DOI is the most reliable identifier. Title and first author work when a DOI is unavailable.
Optional context
  • The direction you want to trace: papers that cite this work, papers this work cites, or related work by topic.
  • A date range if you want to focus on responses from a specific period.
  • A field filter if the paper spans disciplines and you want responses from one of them.

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3. What Anara creates

A ranked list of papers connected to your target through the citation graph, with abstracts, publication years, and a note on PDF availability. The list is what you review to decide which papers to import. Citation graph traversal turns a single anchor paper into a mapped territory: you can see where the conversation went after the paper was published and which responses became foundational enough to accumulate their own citations.

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4. Follow-up prompts

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Find what the anchor paper was built on

When you need the intellectual genealogy behind the argument, not just what came after. 
Now show me the 10 most important papers that "How Democracies Die" itself cites, focused on comparative politics and democratic theory. Which ones appear repeatedly in the bibliographies of papers that cite it?

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Import the most relevant results

When you have identified the papers you want to add to your library. 
Import the first five papers from this list into my library. Create a folder called "Democratic Backsliding" and place them there.

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Find papers on the same topic that did not cite the anchor

When you want to make sure you are not missing work that developed independently. 
Search for papers on democratic backsliding and competitive authoritarianism published between 2015 and 2022 that did not cite Levitsky and Ziblatt. I want to know what the parallel literature looks like.

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5. Tricks, tips, and troubleshooting

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How you word your prompt shapes what you get

Providing a DOI produces more accurate results than a title alone. For papers with common titles or multiple editions, the DOI is the only reliable anchor. Asking for “most cited” returns papers with the highest citation counts, which tends toward reviews and meta-analyses rather than empirical work. If you want empirical responses, say so. Specifying “peer-reviewed articles” filters out book chapters, working papers, and preprints, which may or may not be what you want depending on your field.

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Check the output against your own understanding

The citation graph Anara searches is the OpenAlex index. It is comprehensive but not exhaustive: some journals are indexed later than others, and very recent papers may lack citation data. If a paper you know exists does not appear, look it up directly by DOI. The “related work” graph type returns papers in the same conceptual neighborhood rather than direct citations, and relevance varies by how the indexing algorithm defines relatedness in your field.

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What to do with the output next

Review the abstract of every paper in the list before importing. Citation count is a useful first filter but a paper cited 300 times may be cited primarily as a historical reference, not because its methods are still in use. Import the papers most relevant to your argument, then use the cross-library-search or compare-papers workflow to understand how the ones you have just imported relate to papers you already have. The citation graph is the starting point for building a systematic bibliography; the library workflows are how you work through what you have gathered.