Citation Analysis with Mark-and-Recapture

TL;DR

This paper applies the Mark-and-Recapture method from biology to estimate the total number of relevant publications in a research area, providing a practical stopping rule for literature searches.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of biological estimation techniques to citation analysis, enabling more efficient literature review processes.

Findings

Effective estimation of total relevant publications

Proposed stopping rule for literature searches

Demonstrated applicability to citation datasets

Abstract

Mark-and-Recapture is a methodology from Population Biology to estimate the number of a species without counting every individual. This is done by multiple samplings of the species using traps and discounting the instances that were caught repeated. In this paper we show that this methodology is applicable for citation analysis as it is also not feasible to count all the relevant publications of a research topic. In addition this estimation also allows us to propose a stopping rule for researchers to decide how far one should extend their search for relevant literature.