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6540113 
Technical Report 
Guidelines for snowballing in systematic literature studies and a replication in software engineering 
Wohlin, C 
2014 
ACM Press 
New York, NY 
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering - EASE '14 
38 
English 
Background: Systematic literature studies have become common in software engineering, and hence it is important to understand how to conduct them efficiently and reliably.

Objective: This paper presents guidelines for conducting literature reviews using a snowballing approach, and they are illustrated and evaluated by replicating a published systematic literature review.

Method: The guidelines are based on the experience from conducting several systematic literature reviews and experimenting with different approaches.

Results: The guidelines for using snowballing as a way to search for relevant literature was successfully applied to a systematic literature review.

Conclusions: It is concluded that using snowballing, as a first search strategy, may very well be a good alternative to the use of database searches. 
9781450324762 
EASE '14: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 
London, United Kingdom 
May 13-14, 2014