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Use Citation Searching when you need to find newer articles that cite particular important, older works.  Identifying these newer, citing references may be useful for a number of reasons:

• locating current research based on earlier research, patents, reports, etc.
• finding how many times and where a publication is being cited
• identifying who is referencing a particular paper
• exploring how a particular research topic is being used to support other research
• analyzing the impact of a publication on other research in the field
• tracking the history of a research idea
• tracking the research of a colleague, or keeping track of your own research

Note, while older papers are often cited because the newer paper is building upon that earlier work, citations sometimes simply reflect the fact that the same methodology was used, possibly for a very different purpose.

Below are the major, multidisciplinary databases offering citation searching. Increasingly, other, subject-focused databases also offer this facility. Additionally, many databases provide the option to sort your results by "Times Cited" (or similar language).  This sorting technique can help you identify the articles that are cited most heavily in a specific research area.