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Searching the literature

A guide for staff and students undertaking a thorough literature review

Snowballing and cited reference searching

Snowballing and cited reference searching build on an article or other document you already know is relevant to your study – a “citation pearl”.

Look through the list of cited references to go back in time by following up the sources the authors used. This is often called snowballing.
Use the “citation pearl” to go forward in time by using a citation index. The quickest way is to paste the title into Google Scholar and click 'Cited by'.

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window Google Scholar is a search engine that indexes the content of scholarly material published on the Web and in electronic books and journals. But not all publishers have agreed to allow Google access to their content, so you should not rely on GoogleScholar when searching for literature. It is very useful for finding out who has cited key papers - "citation pearls".

Scopus This link opens in a new window An abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature in the fields of science, mathematics, engineering, technology, health and medicine, social sciences and arts & humanities.
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Web of Science (All Subjects) This link opens in a new window Indexes thousands of high quality, peer-reviewed journals, providing complete bibliographic data, full-length abstracts and links to cited references and citing articles.
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