Use PubMed's similar-article links to find papers that share MeSH terms with your key study, and use OpenAlex concept filters to pull a broader topic-based set; comparing the two lists shows related work that citation chaining missed. The two routes start from different signals, so they surface different neighbors.
PubMed similar-article links: shared indexing terms
PubMed supports similar-article links alongside field tags, filters, Advanced Search, and citation matching for locating and refining biomedical records. The similar-article route works from the record's indexing, so it groups papers that share MeSH terms (the controlled vocabulary terms assigned to describe a paper's content) even when those papers never cite your key study. This is the route to use when the study is recent or niche and its citation list is thin.
- Open the key study's PubMed record and follow its similar-article links. Expected result: a set of records linked through shared indexing rather than through citations.
- Scan titles and abstracts for papers that address the same mechanism, population, or method. Decision point: keep records whose shared terms match the concept you are trying to support in the draft.
- Note which of these papers your citation chaining had already found. The remainder is your candidate list of missed related work.
OpenAlex concept filters: topic-level broadening
OpenAlex search can match text across entity fields, and filters plus entity identifiers narrow works by attributes such as authorship, concepts, dates, and open-access status. Concept filters therefore let you define the topic itself and retrieve works tagged to it, independent of whether they connect to your key study by citation or by MeSH term.
- Identify the concepts that describe your key study's topic in OpenAlex.
- Apply those concept filters, adding date or open-access filters if you need to narrow the set. Expected result: a topic-level pool of works.
- Compare this pool against both your citation-chaining results and the PubMed similar-article list.
What the comparison tells you
A paper that appears in the OpenAlex concept set but in neither the citation chain nor the PubMed similar-article list is a candidate your original method missed; check its abstract before citing it. A paper that appears in the PubMed list but not in the concept set suggests the shared MeSH terms capture a relationship the topic filter does not. Treat any single list as a starting point and confirm each candidate against its own record.
Semantic Scholar also offers paper, citation, recommendation, and dataset APIs for scholarly discovery and metadata retrieval, which gives a third route if the two above leave gaps.