A new application developed by two School of Communication students has joined a set of tools at Northwestern Libraries to help researchers shave hours off their searches. An upcoming library workshop will help researchers get the most from the app.
McWeeny
SnowGlobe, developed by Communication Sciences and Disorders doctoral candidate Sean McWeeny ’21 and former undergraduate June Choe ’20—and with financial and training support from Northwestern Libraries—gets its name from a technique called snowball searching that is used in specific types of literature reviews called systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
Choe
Systematic reviews require more detail than traditional literature reviews because they involve collecting and summarizing all empirical evidence for a particular set of criteria. Common in medical and scientific fields, they are meant to be exhaustive and reproduceable. Similarly, meta-analyses combine information from all relevant studies and use statistical methods to summarize the results.
Researchers conducting these types of reviews often employ snowball searching to find each paper’s references (in other words, papers it has cited, represented by blue lines in figure below) and citations (papers that cite that paper; dashed purple lines). This can be done easily enough for a single paper using a database like Web of Science or Scopus, but is time-consuming when screening multiple papers. SnowGlobe expedites this process by searching for multiple papers using their titles, PMIDs, or DOIs and finding the hidden connections (dotted green line) that would take hours to find by hand. Because SnowGlobe uses Microsoft Academic as its source material, researchers from across the disciplines would benefit from integrating this tool into their literature searching processes.
The Libraries are hosting a free virtual workshop that will include an introduction to SnowGlobe, a demonstration of some of SnowGlobe’s features, and time for attendees to try using the application themselves. Join us:
Date: Tuesday, May 18
Time: 2 p.m. – 3 p.m. Central
Register here to receive the Zoom link.
Users are also welcome to email Becca Greenstein at rgreenst@northwestern.edu with any questions.