literature review tips and tricks

Search Tips and Tricks There are a number of ways to find relevant academic literature. The first thing to remember is that most academic databases are designed with fairly rudimentary search functions – if you're accustomed to Google you'll be disappointed with the terrible U/X and primitive search of most academic databases. One of the most important ramifications of this is that you have to plan your search out a little bit more comprehensively.

It goes without saying that knowing what databases are best for your subject matter is a critical precursor step – if you're just starting out you may wish to just ask your advisor or Google what the best databases for your field are in order to avoid wasting time on this step (Ecker & Skelly, 2010). The first step is that you'll want to carefully define your keywords (Fonseca, 2013).

For an academic database, keywords have to be specific and targeted – the sorts of vague, long-tailed searchers you might do online won't yield anything meaningful. Carefully choosing the topic keywords should include ensuring that at least keyword is unique to your field, in order to reduce the amount of false positives from other fields that might use similar terminology. Keywords can often be truncated, so try inputting word stems.

Learn the key acronyms and use this to dial in the field, and key sure to try to exclude categories in this is possible (Fonseca, 2013). Once you've found a few articles, you're on your way. One of the most important steps is to start with the most recent article you've found, and work backwards.

Look for the references – what this article cites will also be of value for you in terms of building your literature review, as these other works will provide a substantial amount of background and context. Knowing specific titles and authors will help you to focus your search. Furthermore, those authors might have multiple papers on the topic, so an author search might lead down a productive path. Be inquisitive, and be prepared to surf a little through the literature trail.

A protip here would be to search for an uncommon author's name – more common names yield more false positives. At some point, you'll hit a wall. Whether this is right at the beginning or later on, you'll want to switch it up and visit Google Scholar (Mumper, 2016). The Google search algorithm is the best in the world, so you're bound to get some good results. The downside is that you often cannot access the articles, or only can access the abstracts.

The latter is fine – then you'll know whether you need to track down that article or not. But you can take the doi information from Google Scholar and enter that into the academic database, which should enable you to retrieve that particular article. By focusing on specific authors, and the threads of research that exist, you are not only expanding on the first, initial papers but you are also narrowing the search by following specific threads of research to get into more detail.

The final literature review will probably contain both breadth of concepts, but with each concept examined in depth. One of the best ways to add some breadth to the research is to think creatively. Do not be afraid to wander a bit outside your core subject area to apply research in other fields – this effort may not always be successful but your literature search is really just a first draft – ideas that do not work out can be edited out later.

The biggest tip of all, however, is probably patience and diligence. The reality is that a literature search is a time-consuming process. There are roadblocks and dead-ends. Some of the material you will.