Abstract
BackgroundThe value of citation searches as part of the systematic review process is currently unknown. While the major guides to conducting systematic reviews state that citation searching should be carried out in addition to searching bibliographic databases there are still few studies in the literature that support this view. Rather than using a predefined search strategy to retrieve studies, citation searching uses known relevant papers to identify further papers.MethodsWe describe a case study about the effectiveness of using the citation sources Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science and OVIDSP MEDLINE to identify records for inclusion in a systematic review.We used the 40 included studies identified by traditional database searches from one systematic review of interventions for multiple risk behaviours. We searched for each of the included studies in the four citation sources to retrieve the details of all papers that have cited these studies.We carried out two analyses; the first was to examine the overlap between the four citation sources to identify which citation tool was the most useful; the second was to investigate whether the citation searches identified any relevant records in addition to those retrieved by the original database searches.ResultsThe highest number of citations was retrieved from Google Scholar (1680), followed by Scopus (1173), then Web of Science (1095) and lastly OVIDSP (213). To retrieve all the records identified by the citation tracking searching all four resources was required. Google Scholar identified the highest number of unique citations.The citation tracking identified 9 studies that met the review’s inclusion criteria. Eight of these had already been identified by the traditional databases searches and identified in the screening process while the ninth was not available in any of the databases when the original searches were carried out. It would, however, have been identified by two of the database search strategies if searches had been carried out later.ConclusionsBased on the results from this investigation, citation searching as a supplementary search method for systematic reviews may not be the best use of valuable time and resources. It would be useful to verify these findings in other reviews.
Highlights
The value of citation searches as part of the systematic review process is currently unknown
The objectives of this study are to investigate (1) the overlap between the four citation sources to identify which citation tool, or combination of tools, is the most useful to use and (2) whether citation searching identified any relevant records in addition to those retrieved by the original database searches
We carried out two analyses; the first examined the overlap between the four citation sources to identify which citation tool, or combination of citation tools, was the most useful to use and the second investigated whether the citation searches had identified any relevant records, in addition to those retrieved by the original database searches
Summary
The value of citation searches as part of the systematic review process is currently unknown. While the major guides to conducting systematic reviews state that citation searching should be carried out in addition to searching bibliographic databases there are still few studies in the literature that support this view. The main guides [1-4] to conducting literature searches for systematic reviews describe how citation searching can identify relevant papers and suggest that this approach should be carried out in addition to using comprehensive searches of bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE and Embase. There is, little evidence that this is an effective way to identify studies for potential inclusion in reviews It is still uncertain whether citation searching can be used to identify unique studies not found by database searches or whether citation searching could be used to replace any of the existing database sources. When considering new resources or approaches to searching, such as Google Scholar, it is important to evaluate 1) sensitivity and precision of strategies 2) the resource’s potential for identifying unique studies not available in the databases already used and 3) time and cost
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