A Comparison of Citation Sources for Reference and Citation-Based Search in Systematic Literature Reviews

Context: In software engineering, snowball sampling has been used as a supplementary and primary search strategy. The current guidelines recommend using Google Scholar (GS) for snowball sampling. However, the use of GS presents several challenges when using it as a source for citations and references. Objective: To compare the effectiveness and usefulness of two leading citation databases (GS and Scopus) for use in snowball sampling search. Method: We relied on a published study that has used snowball sampling as a search strategy and GS as the citation source. We used its primary studies to compute precision and recall for Scopus. Results: In this particular case, Scopus was highly effective with 95% recall and had better precision of 5.1% compared to GS’s 2.8%. Moreover, Scopus found nine additional relevant papers. On average, one would read approximately 15 extra papers in GS than Scopus to identify one additional relevant paper. Furthermore, Scopus supports batch downloading of both citations and papers’ references, has better quality metadata, and does better source filtering. Conclusion: This study suggests that Scopus seems to be more effective and useful for snowball sampling than GS for systematic secondary studies attempting to identify peer-reviewed literature.