Background: Forward citation chasing, defined as the use of a citation index to retrieve references that cite a source, is currently recommended as a complement to find all possibly relevant research for systematic reviews (SRs). Recently, new tools have been developed to ease this task, but their performance has not been compared yet.
Objectives: To compare the performance of different forward citation indexes and tools for forward citation chase in a sample of Cochrane SRs.
Methods: We searched for Cochrane SRs with at least two published versions 5 years apart. Starting from an ‘index reference set’ (i.e., references of the included studies in the original version of the SR, plus the reference of the original SR itself), we conducted a forward citation search using the following resources: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, Google Scholar, Citationchaser, Paperfetcher, and Citation cloud. We assessed the performance of each tool regarding the identification of the ‘target reference set’ (i.e., primary study references included only in the updated version of the SR but not in the original version) in terms of sensitivity and precision.
Results: Preliminary, median sensitivity and precision results were, respectively, as follows: WoS: 85.7%/1.4%, Scopus: 78.6%/1.3%, Google Scholar: 78.6%/0.7%, Citationchaser: 41.1%/0.4%, Paperfetcher: 44.6%/1.0%, and Citation cloud: 57.4%/1.3%.
Conclusions: From our preliminary analysis, WoS showed the best performance in terms of sensitivity and specificity for conducting forward citation searches. The full findings of our research will be presented at the colloquium.
Patient, public and/or healthcare consumer involvement: None.