Finding Literature for Reviews
A literature review is an evaluative report of information found in the literature related to your selected area of study. The review should describe, summarise, evaluate and clarify this literature. It should give a theoretical base for the research and help you (the author) determine the nature of your research. A good literature review should:
- find what information already exist in your field of research
- identify the gaps in the literature
- find experts working in your field
- identify major seminal works
- identify main methodologies and research techniques
- identify main ideas, theories and conclusions and establish similarities and differences
- provide a context for your own research
- show relationships between previous studies and theories.
Writing the literature review allows you to demonstrate skills in the areas of information seeking and critical appraisal.
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Defining Search Terms
The first step in the process of searching is to identify the key concepts from your research question or search objectives. These concepts describe the kinds of information you need to investigate to answer your research question. Consider the concepts in the context of key readings you are already aware of or search around the topic generally before commencing serious research. A concept or mind map can help explore your topic and clarify the logic of these concepts and illustrate their relationships. You should also consider the different search objectives you might have relevant to the different sections of your thesis or stages of your research.
Further Resources: Finding information – Search Tips
Preliminary Searching
Initial or preliminary searching helps in establishing a basis for later specific or more comprehensive searching. Preliminary searching can help clarify the topic and supply basic knowledge upon which to develop an improved searching focus. It can help you refine your research question, find synonyms and to become clearer on the direction of your research. In addition, preliminary searching will assist identification of the key terminology in your field for the constructs you are interested in exploring. It is important to determine and use the terminology that experts in your field use, consider how the database thesaurus treat the terms in your research question - are there relevant subject headings? Remember, recognisability is about whether you can identify the terms in your question in the literature. Refer to the property of recognisability for clarification. For preliminary searching, use general or broad search tools such as Google Scholar and the Library search tool.
Searching Subject Headings
Subject headings are a set of terms and phrases, from a controlled vocabulary that are used to describe the content of books and articles and are assigned by cataloguers and indexers. Subject headings take some of the guess work out of searching, saves time and help make searching more effective and efficient and in many cases more directed. There are many ways to describe the same term, a subject heading brings these terms together under a single word or phrase. Look to see whether the database you are searching has a thesaurus to browse for the subjects that match your topic/word/phrase.
Known Item Searching
Find a specific journal article from a reference or citation. A journal article citation will include the journal title, volume, issue and page numbering.
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