from the recent discussion on the Medial Libraries Discussion List:
pearl growing/building/purling/citation pearling – citation associations (or keyword associations through pearl growing) can be conceptually incestuous when it comes to building a comprehensive search. For example, you would unlikely see someone who uses a behavioural approach to intervention citing a cognitive theorist or vice versa. In both cases if you stayed within one paradigm you’d miss important points of view/evidence. Reviewing and using additional index or key terms
citation tracking/tracking/searching/chasing/referencing/mining.
Ancestral searching
tree – bread crumbing – staircase
The Oxford Guide to Library Research by Thomas Mann (4th edition, 2015), Chapter Six is titled Citation Search and Mann uses the term Citation Searching. I and other faculty have used this text in our library school online research classes at SJSU School of Information.
Citation Searching
http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/Snowballing
Snowballing is sometimes referred to as *reference harvesting* or *pearl
growing search method*; here are some other terms that evoke similar kinds
of search strategies:
– forward citation searching, footnote chasing, reference scanning,
reference harvesting, hand-searching & powerbrowsing
– backward chaining, forward chaining, digital browsing, footnote
chasing
– pearl growing, reference harvesting, reference lists, reference
searches, ‘cited by searching’ ….and so on
Bates articulates 29 different search strategies in a era before online databases:
Bates, M. (1979). Information search tactics. Journal of the American Society for Information …. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.4630300406/full [https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/Information%20Search%20Tactics.html]