Novel citation-based search method for scientific literature: a validation study
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evidence Based Medicine, Science and Medical Education, Data Science
- Keywords
- co-citation, meta-analysis, Citation, systematic review, literature search, keywords
- Copyright
- © 2019 Janssens et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Novel citation-based search method for scientific literature: a validation study. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27646v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27646v1
Abstract
Objective: We recently developed CoCites, a citation-based search method that is designed to be more efficient than traditional keyword-based methods. The method begins with identification of one or more highly relevant publications (query articles) and consists of two searches: the co-citation search, which ranks publications on their co-citation frequency with the query articles, and the citation search, which ranks publications on frequency of all citations that cite or are cited by the query articles. Materials and Methods: We aimed to reproduce the literature searches of published systematic reviews and meta-analyses (n=250) and assess whether CoCites retrieves all eligible articles while screening fewer titles. Results: CoCites retrieved a median of 75% of the articles that were included in the original reviews. The percentage of retrieved articles was higher (88%) when the query articles were cited more frequently and when they had more overlap in their citations. Applying CoCites to only the highest-cited article yielded similar results. The co-citation and citation searches combined were more efficient when the review authors had screened more than 500 titles, but not when they had screened less. Discussion: CoCites uses the expert knowledge of authors to rank related articles. The method does not depend on keyword selection and requires no special expertise to build search queries. The method is transparent and reproducible. Conclusion: CoCites is an efficient and accurate method for finding relevant related articles.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. The authors welcome feedback.
Supplemental Information
Supplementary file
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