Literature search

As IPBES assessments are built on existing knowledge, literature searches are at the base of the assessment work. Searching for the most up-to-date and adequate information is therefore vital. Many common search engines have biases, for example based on previous searches and on geographical location of the person carrying out the search, which as the additional effect that searches are not reproducible and transparant.

A literature platform that is transparent and produces reproducible results, is OpenAlex, which is recommended for literature searches. OpenAlex contains grey literature as well as scientific literature.

Searches can be done based on keywords, or references that were cited in literature that are highlighted by the experts based on expert knowledge. Automatic searches based on citations is called snowballing, which can go backwards (all references that were cited in a keypaper, and the references that were cited in those papers, etc. or forward, discovering all literature that cited the keypaper.

To assist snowball searches, a dedicated technical guideline was developed: Technical guideline on snowball searches and literature analyses using OpenAlex.