11.4.4 Finding literature for meta-analytical studies

Canadian-based academic, Vas Taras, describes how he uses PoP for his meta-analytic work. “After I complete the conventional literature search (going through tables of contents of relevant journals, searching scholarly article databases using key words that describe the topic of my interest), I conduct an additional search using PoP. First, I check who cited every publication included in my original meta-analytic database. For every study in the initial dataset, PoP can help find, on average, 0.5 to 1.5 additional studies.

Second, I go through the list of authors of the studies included in my original meta-analytic database and see what names appear there more often. Once the leaders (most published authors in the area) are identified, I run their names through PoP to see if there may be more studies that they have published on the topic of my interest. I could use Google Scholar, but PoP has a much more convenient and streamlined interface. For example, I can easily limit the time range, define the field, etc - things that can be done in Google Scholar, but it would be much more hassle to do it. This strategy yields one to three additional papers per author - people often tend to publish several studies on the same topic. After running these two additional searches, my meta-analytic datasets usually doubles in size.”