Citation Mining, Pearl Growing, and Snowballing III
The student may wish to know:
Is there any difference between citation mining, pearl growing, and snowballing?
Our reply might be:
They basically mean the same thing. The expression pearl growing, also known as citation mining or snowballing, is a search strategy that uses a good citation already discovered to find further relevant citations. When used as a verb, to snowball means to increase, accumulate, expand, or multiply at a rapidly accelerating rate. So if we identify a useful citation, it can quickly lead to many other citations that will be helpful for our thesis or academic research project.
Next, the student may inquire:
What is the best approach to snowballing?
We could say:
There have been formal research articles about the best method for snowballing, for example, Guidelines for Snowballing in Systematic Literature: Studies and a Replication in Software Engineering by Claes Wohlin of the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden.
Dr. Wohlin argues:
Snowballing refers to using the reference list of a paper or the citations to the paper to identify additional papers. However, snowballing could benefit from not only looking at the reference lists and citations, but to complement it with a systematic way of looking at where papers are actually referenced and where papers are cited. Using the references and the citations respectively is referred to as backward and forward snowballing.
The website of the Cardiff Business School offers the following additional advice:
The snowballing technique involves two approaches. First, you scour the references sections of articles that you have already included in the review. Second, you can use certain citation tracking databases to identify articles that had subsequently cited papers that you have included in the review. The first approach works back in time from the article, whilst the second approach works forward in time from that article.
Some databases allow you to undertake this process electronically. The following example shows a paper on systematic review published in the British Journal of Management in 2003. The search was performed in the ISI Web of Knowledge database. You can see that this article references 75 texts. Since publication in 2003 this paper has been cited by 48 papers in the ISI Web of Knowledge database.
The student may wonder:
What is the difference between reverse and forward snowballing?
We may say:
Reverse snowballing looks back through an article’s references. In this way, the researcher can gain a better understanding of how knowledge on a topic has evolved, as well as identify experts on the topic. Reverse searches can continue as far back through a line of articles as appears necessary. Forward snowballing, also known as citation mining, looks at the citations of the original article after its publication. This allows the researcher to view recent articles on a particular topic, taking into consideration any changes to theory or methods, and identifying current trends in the topic.
The student may next ask:
Are there any problems with the snowballing approach that I should look out for?
Our reply:
As its name suggests, with snowballing, one article can rapidly lead to many other articles, so it is important to keep in mind that our research is meant to be a selective process.
If we include too many articles or books that are not specifically relevant to our own research project, then this just takes more time than necessary in trying to make a concise summary of past research and what we can learn from it. Keep in mind that the goal is to eliminate what is not immediately useful to us, just as much as identifying what is specifically pertinent to our project. In this way, the snowballing technique can create a substantial amount of material, but it is up to us to evaluate it, and decide what is most important for our own purposes as original researchers.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)