Databases publicly available for online searching permit both citation and subject searching, however, subject searching has dominated the online search environment. Despite the power of citation searching, it may be underutilized This study explored the relationship between the number of cited references used in a citation search and information retrieval effectiveness, a relatively unstudied phenomenon. Three articles in the library and information science literature were chosen to represent sample questions. Cited reference searches were conducted for each article and each of its references. All searches were conducted in Social Scisearch and Scisearch on DIALOG. Relevance judgments on the retrieved citations were obtained from the authors of the original articles. This research focused on analyzing, in terms of information retrieval effectiveness, the overlap among postings sets retrieved by various combinations of cited references. The findings from the three case studies clearly showed that the more cited references used for the citation search, the better the performance, in terms of retrieving more relevant documents, up to a point of diminishing retums. In addition, generally the overall level of overlap among relevant documents sets was found to be low. Therefore, if only some of the cited references among many candidates are used for a citation search, a significant proportion of relevant documents may be missed. The analysis of the characteristics of cited references provided the ways to predict which cited refereces would be useful to improve information retrieval. The findings of this comprehensive exploratory study are of interest for both theoretical and practical reasons. They contribute to the development of a theoretical model for the effective use of the citation search. This model might also be implemented in operational online systems. In addition, the findings potentially will help online searchers improve their search strategies using the citation search so that they can better achieve their information retrieval goals: the retrieval of items relevant to a given question and the suppression of nonrelevant items.