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Literature search: Citation search

Overall guide for literature search

Citation search

The aim of the citation search (also called snowballing) is to find other relevant publications that are included in the reference list of the seed article (backward citation search) or that cite the seed article itself (forward citation search).
 

These are very efficient ways of increasing your publication sample.

Citation search process

Wohlin (2014) presents a schematic overview of the citation search process (see below):

  •     Identify a starting set of papers
  •     Evaluate references and citations
  •     Exclude or include the new paper
  •     Include on the basis of the full paper
  •     Repeat or stop the process depending on the results

Wohlin, C. (2014). Guidelines for snowballing in systematic literature studies and a replication in software engineering. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 38, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/2601248.2601268

Example: Citation search in Web of Science and Google Scholar

Web of Science

Cited references = backward citation search

Citations = forward citation search

 

Google Scholar

Cited by = forward citation search