Snowballer

Description

The Snowballer tool automates snowball literature searches.

Starting from any set of articles you can find in OpenAlex, give their OpenAlex work IDs plus a few preferences to Snowballer. Snowballer will use OpenAlex to find and return a list of cited and/or citing works.

Steps

1. Set up your seed works (the starting article or articles for your snowball search)
   1. Search OpenAlex for your seed works.
   2. Either export OpenAlex search results to a CSV file or create your own CSV file with OpenAlex work IDs in the first column.
2. Download either Snowballer.exe or the Python files from Snowballer's code directory.
   1. If using the Python files, open control.py and update the hard-coded variable code_dir to reflect the file path for your local copy of the code files.
   2. Run either Snowballer.exe (on Windows) or control.py. After responding to some prompts, you should receive a new file listing the works Snowballer found.