Citation analysis as a literature search method for systematic reviews

Abstract

Systematic reviews are essential for evaluating biomedical treatment options, but the growing size and complexity of the available biomedical literature combined with the rigor of the systematic review method mean that systematic reviews are extremely difficult and labor‐intensive to perform. In this article, I propose a method of searching the literature by systematically mining the various types of citation relationships between articles. I then test the method by comparing its precision and recall to that of 14 published systematic reviews. The method successfully retrieved 74% of the studies included in these reviews and 90% of the studies it could reasonably be expected to retrieve. The method also retrieved fewer than half of the total number of publications retrieved by these reviews and can be performed in substantially less time. This suggests that the proposed method offers a promising complement to traditional text‐based methods of literature identification and retrieval for systematic reviews.

A Bibliometric Analysis of Health and Medical Journals: Issues in Medical Scholarly Communication in Africa

“…Onyancha (2008b: 56) Citation to articles or journals is believed to determine the impact of the publication in global research communities and relatedness between scientific publications (Belter, 2015 …”

Completeness of the reporting of evidence-based practice educational interventions: a review

“…One potential limitation of this review concerns the risk that relevant articles were not detected by using citation analysis as a search strategy. However, the accuracy rate of citation analysis has been found to be acceptable . For instance, using this technique, Janssens and Gwinn identified 94% (range: 75–100%) of all articles included in 10 different meta‐analyses that were originally retrieved using traditional search strategies, whereas only 10% as many articles were screened using a traditional search strategy.…”

“…We tracked the forward and backward citations of these index articles using the Web of Science database until March 2016. Citation analysis can efficiently elude the time‐consuming and complex nature of traditional search strategies with an acceptable rate of accuracy . Further, citation analysis does not depend on the use of specific keywords and search terms, which may be advantageous, particularly in disciplines in which there is inconsistent terminology .…”

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2018)

“…Namely, using co-citation and bibliographic coupling , direct networks (Caschili, De Montis, Ganciu, Ledda, & Barra, 2014) and local Backward and Forward networks (Belter, 2016;Couteau, 2014). Also, there are some tools like Sci2, Citeseer, Google Scholar or Researchgate that crawls and apply the mentioned or similar bibliometric metrics or algorithms.…”

“…It is based on well-proven networks metrics, Micro (Eigenvector Centrality and Betweenness Centrality), Meso ( Modularity maximisation (Blondel, Guillame, Lambiotte, & Lefebvre, 2008;Lancichinetti & Fortunato, 2011;Newman, 2006)) and Macro perspectives combination and it applies them to Backward and Forward entire citation networks. Forward citation has been used until now (Belter, 2016;Couteau, 2014) but locally around a document, and to interpret an existing document when a new one cites it, but saying nothing about the citing new one. Namely, Eigenvector Centrality is an energy diffusion vector in a steady state of energy, representing a ranking of documents where the knowledge (the diffused element) of the network is deposited (Rodriguez & Shinavier, 2010).…”