Snowballing

This project provides tools for perfoming a liberature review through snowballing. It includes Jupyter Notebook widgets that assist the backward and forward steps of literature snowballing, notebooks that assist in inserting citations in the database, and notebooks for analyzing the snowballing and producing citation graphs, publication place histograms, and a summarization of the snowballing steps.

This package was tested on Python 3.6 using Windows, but it should support Python > 3.5 in any operating system. Please, open an issue if it is not the case.

Please, find the project documentation at https://joaofelipe.github.io/snowballing

Getting started

To install the tool, you should follow these instructions:

First, install the python package:
- $ pip install snowballing
Then, download and install the latest geckodriver
- In my case, I put the 'geckodriver.exe' file in the Firefox directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox)
- And I add the directory to the PATH environment variable
If you want to export the snowballing history (provenance), you must also install the following tools
- provtoolbox
- GraphViz

For starting a new literature review project, please run:

$ snowballing start literature

This command will create a directory called literature (you are free to use other name in the command) with the notebooks for performing the snowballing and analyzing it, and an example database.

Inside the directory, start Jupyter:

$ cd literature
$ jupyter notebook

And open the file Index.ipynb. This file contains all the instructions for understanding the database and performing the snowballing.

Contributing

Feel free to contribute to the project!

For installing in development mode, clone the repository and use pip install -e:

$ git clone git@github.com:JoaoFelipe/snowballing.git
$ cd snowballing
$ pip install -e snowballing

Notes

This project started as part of a literature snowballing. The tools were developped out of necessity in a adhoc way. Thus, it has some bad design decisions, such as using Python scripts as a database, and choosing field names that are far from ideal.

Contributions to fix these and other issues are welcome! If you are going to change a field name that is used by the tool, please, try to make it configurable.

Contact

Do not hesitate to contact me:

João Felipe Pimentel joaofelipenp@gmail.com

License Terms

The MIT License (MIT)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.