title: Novel citation-based search method for scientific literature: application to meta-analyses.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Finding eligible studies for meta-analysis and systematic reviews relies on keyword-based searching as the gold standard, despite its inefficiency. Searching based on direct citations is not sufficiently comprehensive. We propose a novel strategy that ranks articles on their degree of co-citation with one or more "known" articles before reviewing their eligibility.
  
  
  METHODS
  In two independent studies, we aimed to reproduce the results of literature searches for sets of published meta-analyses (n = 10 and n = 42). For each meta-analysis, we extracted co-citations for the randomly selected 'known' articles from the Web of Science database, counted their frequencies and screened all articles with a score above a selection threshold. In the second study, we extended the method by retrieving direct citations for all selected articles.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In the first study, we retrieved 82% of the studies included in the meta-analyses while screening only 11% as many articles as were screened for the original publications. Articles that we missed were published in non-English languages, published before 1975, published very recently, or available only as conference abstracts. In the second study, we retrieved 79% of included studies while screening half the original number of articles.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Citation searching appears to be an efficient and reasonably accurate method for finding articles similar to one or more articles of interest for meta-analysis and reviews.
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta, Georgia, 30322, USA. cecile.janssens@emory.edu.|Department of Clinical Genetics/EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research, Section Community Genetics, VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. cecile.janssens@emory.edu.
authors.forename: A Cecile J W
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Janssens
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta, Georgia, 30322, USA. mgwinn2@emory.edu.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gwinn
mesh_terms: D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods*; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D006801:Humans; D015201:Meta-Analysis as Topic; D011642:Publications