Writing your thesis and conducting a literature review

Depending upon your topic, it may be appropriate to search the grey literature and/or snowball your search.

Snowballing, also known as citation chaining, is the process of searching the references and/or the citations of your articles to identify other relevant material. Indexes such as Scopus and Web of Science enable you to carry out this procedure.

Grey literature refers to material not usually found in the commercial publisher databases, e.g., government reports, conference proceedings, theses, etc.

As with your search-string searches, it is important to document the process you went through to locate additional studies through snowballing and/or ad-hoc searching of the literature.

Any studies identified through snowballing and/or ad-hoc searching, that are to be included in your review, must be evaluated against your inclusion and exclusion criteria at the full text screening stage and against the quality appraisal checklist in the quality appraisal stage.

The number of articles located through these processes should be separately documented at each of these two stages, along with the number of articles from your search string searches.