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Guidelines for snowballing in systematic literature studies and a replication in software engineering

Published: 13 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Background: Systematic literature studies have become common in software engineering, and hence it is important to understand how to conduct them efficiently and reliably.
Objective: This paper presents guidelines for conducting literature reviews using a snowballing approach, and they are illustrated and evaluated by replicating a published systematic literature review.
Method: The guidelines are based on the experience from conducting several systematic literature reviews and experimenting with different approaches.
Results: The guidelines for using snowballing as a way to search for relevant literature was successfully applied to a systematic literature review.
Conclusions: It is concluded that using snowballing, as a first search strategy, may very well be a good alternative to the use of database searches.

References

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cover image ACM Other conferences
EASE '14: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
May 2014
486 pages
ISBN:9781450324762
DOI:10.1145/2601248
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Brunel University: Brunel University

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 May 2014

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Author Tags

  1. replication
  2. snowball search
  3. snowballing
  4. systematic literature review
  5. systematic mapping studies

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  • Research-article

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EASE '14
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  • Brunel University

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Overall Acceptance Rate 71 of 232 submissions, 31%

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  • (2024)De l’hostilité à la sécurité : conceptualiser la notion d’espace sécuritaire comme moyen de promotion de l’activité physique auprès des femmes considérées comme âgéesRecherches féministes10.7202/1108765ar36:1(49-68)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2024
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