Bibliographic mining is a specific research technique that can prove highly effective once you've found a few relevant articles. It is sometimes called backward citation searching or cited reference searching.
Once you have found a few relevant articles providing insight into your research question, take some time to scan through the bibliographies of these articles. Bibliographies -- also called References -- can provide you with picture of the thinking and research on your topic up to the time the article was published. It gives you a snapshot of the sources that influenced the author's work, and can help you identify key authors, theories, and publications related to your topic.