Literature Review Tips and Tricks Essay

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…