Trace a paper's citations

Name a paper by title, author, or DOI and Anara finds the papers that cite it, the papers it cites, or related work, searching a 240-million-paper index. Use it to trace the influence of a finding or build a bibliography around a central study.

Prompt

A doctoral student in political sociology maps responses to a key work for a chapter on democratic backsliding.

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.

What to add to your library

• Required: the paper you want to trace. A DOI is the most reliable identifier; title and first author work when there is none.
• Optional: the direction to trace: papers that cite it, papers it cites, or related work by topic.
• Optional: a date range or field filter, to focus on one period or discipline.

What you get

• A ranked list of connected papers with titles, abstracts, and publication years.
• A note on PDF availability and a direct path to import the ones you want.
• A view of where the conversation went after the paper and which responses became foundational.

Follow-ups

Find what the anchor paper was built on.

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?

Import the most relevant results.

Import the first five papers from this list into my library. Create a folder called "Democratic Backsliding" and place them there.

Tips

• Use a DOI. For common titles or multiple editions it is the only reliable anchor.
• "Most cited" skews toward reviews and meta-analyses. Ask for empirical responses if that is what you want.
• The index is OpenAlex: comprehensive, not exhaustive. If a paper you know is missing, look it up directly by DOI.
• Read abstracts before importing. A heavily cited paper may be cited as a historical reference, not for methods still in use.