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).

Examples:

citations(author:"huchra, john")           # returns the list of papers citing John Huchra's papers
references(bibcode:2003AJ....125..525J)    # returns papers cited by the paper 2003AJ....125..525J
citations(abstract:HST)                    # returns papers citing papers which have "HST" in their abstract

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)