When you submit a query, ADS returns a list of search results. Should you want a list of all the articles which cite those search results , or all the articles which are referenced by those search results, you can use the citation or reference operators.

The syntax for these operators are references(query) and citations(query).

Example Query	Explanation
citations(author:“huchra, john”)	returns the list of records citing John Huchra’s papers
references(bibcode:2003AJ….125..525J)	returns records cited by the paper 2003AJ….125..525J
citations(abstract:JWST)	returns records citing papers which have “JWST” in their abstract
references(data:Chandra)	returns records cited by papers in the Chandra data bibliography

One powerful aspect of having these operators at our disposal when creating a query is that we can combine them with additional search terms to expand or narrow your query. For example, the following query finds all papers which cite the original JWST paper as well as papers which contain the terms “Webb” or “JWST” in their abstract:

citations(bibcode:2006SSRv..123..485G) OR abstract:(Webb OR JWST)