In Locating All Applicable Studies for a Meta-Analysis, Descendancy Searching

Multiple Choice

In locating all applicable studies for a meta-analysis, descendancy searching refers to ____(a) _____, and ascendancy searching refers to _____(b) _____.

A) searching articles in descending order, with most recent articles first (i.e., the descendants) ; searching articles in ascending order, with earliest articles first (i.e., the ancestors)
B) finding seminal articles that are applicable to the meta-analytic hypothesis, and then finding all subsequent articles that cite this seminal article (i.e., the descendants) ; finding very recent major studies relevant to the meta-analysis and then using the references of this recent article to find earlier seminal studies (i.e., the ancestors)
C) finding very recent major studies relevant to the meta-analysis (i.e., the descendants) and then using the references of this recent article to find earlier seminal studies; finding seminal articles that are applicable to the meta-analytic hypothesis (i.e., the ancestors) , and then finding all subsequent articles that cite this seminal article
D) searching articles in ascending chronological order (i.e., starting with the ancestors) ; searching articles in descending order (i.e., starting with the descendants)