There are many ways to find literature for your review, and we recommend that you use a combination of strategies - keeping in mind that you're going to be searching multiple times in a variety of ways, using different databases and resources. Searching the literature is not a straightforward, linear process - it's iterative (translation: you'll search multiple times, modifying your strategies as you go, and sometimes it'll be frustrating).
Once you know you have a good article, there are a lot of useful parts to it - far beyond the content.
Not sure where to start? Try course readings and other required materials.
| Useful Part | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Look at the author-generated keywords, the database subject headings, the title, abstract and introduction for words that may be great additional/alternative search terms. You do not have to know everything about a topic before you start searching. Let what you find introduce you to the language of the field. |
| Author(s) | If someone has written one article on this topic, they may have written more. Click on the author names to see what else they have in the database, or use their names (individually) as a search term elsewhere. |
| Journal | They may have published other articles on your topic. Sometimes a journal will publish a special issue wholly focused on a single topic. Consider browsing or searching within a specific publication. Oftentimes you will end up searching in the journal's website. |
| Instruments | If authors have already created and validated an instrument (survey, tests, and measures), consider if you can use/adapt it for your own work. Look for details in the methods section, an original citation in the reference, and/or a copy in the appendix. |
| References | Experts on this topic have gathered and evaluated these sources, make sure you look through them for potential sources for your own work. |
| Citing | By using the references from the end of an article you'll move backwards and laterally in time to connected literature in the field. This is a great way to find other relevant articles as well as foundational research in the field. |
| Cited by | By using a citation searching database (eg Scopus or Google Scholar) you can more forward and laterally in time to connect to newer literature in the field. This is a great way to find more relevant articles in a fields as well as get as sense of how significant the article you're starting from is to the field as a whole. |
Your search results don't have to be frozen in the moment you search! There are a few things you can set up to keep your search going automatically.
| Alerts | What it Does for You | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Journal Table of Contents | Receive an email each time a new issue is published. This is a great way to read the most current research being published in leading journals in your field. Or consider following journals on social media, via an RSS feed, or app like If This Then That - these tools are great ways to stay up on the new research out there. | Set up an account with the American Journal of Public Health to receive eAlerts. |
| Saved & Scheduled Database Searches | You can create a personal account in most databases so that once you've fine-tuned your search terms and filters on a topic, you can easily rerun the search manually (going back to the database), or set it so the database automatically runs the search on a schedule and emails you any results. Make those tools work for you! | In PubMed, set up MyNCBI to start saving your searching and creating alerts. |
| Google Scholar | Similar to the database alerts, you can tell Google Scholar to email you whenever certain words or phrases (including authors, institutions, methods, keywords, etc.) appear in new search results. | In settings, choose alerts and then enter the word/phrase you want them to email you about. |
Some form of a keyword search is the way most of us get at scholarly articles in database - it's a great approach! Make sure you're familiar with these librarian strategies to get the most out of your searches.
Figuring out the best keywords for your research topic/question is a process - you'll start with one or a few words and then shift, adapt, and expand them as you start finding source that describe the topic using other words. Your search terms are the bridge between known topics and the unknowns of your research question - so sometimes one specific word will be enough, sometimes you'll need several different words to describe a concept AND you'll need to connect that concept to a second (and/or third) concept.
The number and specificity of your search terms depend on your topic and the scope of your literature review.
| Boolean Connector | Purpose |
|---|---|
 |
ANDConnects different concepts (keywords). Narrows down the number of results. |
 |
ORConnects synonyms. Expands the number of results. |
 |
NOTExcludes a concept. Use with extreme caution (even librarians don't use this one much). |
...uses the asterisk (*) to end a word at its core, allowing you to retrieve many more documents containing variations of the search term. Example: educat* will find educate, educates, education, educators, educating and more.
...is when you put quotations marks around two or more words, so that the database looks for those words in that exact order. Examples: "higher education," "public health" and "pharmaceutical industry."
... is when you use the terms the database uses to describe what each article is about as search terms. Searching using controlled vocabularies is a great way to get at everything on a topic in a database.
Databases and search engines are probably going to bring back a lot of results - more than a human can realistically go through. Instead of trying to manually read and sort them all, use the filters in each database to remove the stuff you wouldn't use anyway (ie it's outside the scope of your project).
To make sure you're consistent between searches and databases, write down the filters you're using.
| Filter | How it's Useful |
|---|---|
| Date range | You may want to limit the search results you're seeing based on when they were published. For example, evidence-based medicine often involves looking at research from the last five years, while a project taking a historical perspective will want to include work going further back in time. |
| Language | The Library collects resources in English, but various databases include information about articles in a variety of languages. Consider limiting your search results to just those published in languages that you can read research in. (Note: your professor/advisor may have additional language restrictions. If you are including research in multiple languages make sure that works for them too.) |
| Source Type | Literature reviews usually rely rather narrowly on various scholarly or academic sources, rather than the full spectrum of sources available to you in the world. Consider limiting your results to Academic or Scholarly articles. |
| Article Type | Sometimes you just need a systematic review, empirical study, or some other form of research. Subject specific databases will almost always offer a way to narrow down your results by methodology (article type). When the filter is not available you can add your method of choice as an additional keyword! |
| More... | These are just a start! When you get to a new database, pause and take a look around. Figure out how the database can do some of the work for you - you can always turn off a filter if you do not like what it does. |
One database or search engine is similar to another. Take a few minutes to think about the buttons, links, and other parts you remember from the places you have searched in the past. Then, go through these activities to review common parts of different pages.
Each activity asks questions about the different parts of the page.
Click or activate "Begin" to start the activity.