We formally define the literature (reference) snowballing method and present a refined version of it. We show that the improved algorithm can substantially reduce curator work, even before application of text classification, by reducing the number of candidates to classify. We also present a desktop application named LitBall that implements this and other literature collection methods, through access to the Semantic Scholar academic graph (S2AG).

翻译：我们形式化定义了文献（参考文献）滚雪球方法，并提出了一种改进版本。研究表明，该改进算法甚至在应用文本分类之前，就能通过减少待分类候选文献的数量，显著降低策展人的工作量。我们还介绍了一款名为LitBall的桌面应用程序，该程序通过接入语义学者学术图谱（S2AG），实现了这一方法及其他文献收集方法。