Search Strategy for a Literature Review

For advanced research, the goal of your search strategy will be to locate the major resources on the topic, and additional scholarly and professional resources on closely related topics. Your initial efforts will need to be broad. You need to be willing to seek out  thousands of potential resources, knowing that only a few will be relevant. More than one search tool will likely be necessary. For example, for a topic in psychology, PsycINFO should be the primary database to use, but it shouldn't be the only database you use. In Education, ERIC is the most important database, but it shouldn't be the only research tool you use to find research.

Before you can start your own research efficiently, you will need to outline and follow a search strategy. This strategy will include doing some background reading, searching the literature of the field, finding specifica resources that you can use in your research, and staying focused on the topic even as you broaden, narrow, or modify it, based on your research findings.

Before you dive into the unknown depths of a research project, test the water. That's what background reading helps you do. Background reading can include books, newspaper articles, academic journals, popular magazines, web sites, and (what is often overlooked) reference sources.

Background reading will help you get up to speed if you don't already know something about the topic. At the beginning stage of the process, all you need be looking for at this point is a cursory description of the subject that will better acquaint you to a topic and learn about people and their contributions to the field. You may wish to begin with overviews and resources that can give you a preliminary understanding of a subject. You can concern yourself with the details later.

You can use background reading as a means to discover how to go about further research. You can see what direction or focus other people have taken and what recent trends are. From this you might be decide what approach you might wish to take with a topic.

Since most academic fields rely on jargon, but it can make the reading of academic journals and some magazine articles almost incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Some reference sources will provide definitions to initiate you to the terms of special subject areas.

In many ways, background reading will tell you where to go. Find out what sources other people have been using. When the same sources and authors are cited often, the repetition should be a clue that these persons or works are important to this field of study. Locating authoritative sources on the topic is a major goal of background reading

You will begin to refine your topic as soon as you select it. As you start your research, your topic may be a vague idea, but as you learn more, your understanding will change and so will your topic. Since it will be an ongoing effort, keep in mind a few things about refining a topic. Be open minded and don't limit yourself. Don't look for evidence that will prove your point; be willing to make a conclusion based on the evidence.

Keep focused. Through the library, you may find thousands of sources to sort through, and online there may be millions. Knowing what questions you want to address will help determine which sources are the most relevant for you to use. Keeping a clear focus in mind will help you sort through and evaluate sources. Based on what you learn, you will change and refine your topic, but try not to be distracted or led away from the main thesis. Your focus should guide you as you make these changes. Research is not compiling little piles of unconnected facts. A clear focus will help tie your ideas together and allow you build a cohesive unit.

Since there are so many search tools available for starting a literature review, it is important to keep in mind three different types of online databases. There are two basic types of periodical databases. Some are general and multidisciplinary. They index both popular and scholarly articles. To access the scholarly literature of a particular discipline there are subject specific databases. Some examples are ERIC for education, SOCIndex for Sociology, PsycINFO for psychology, Biology Abstracts for biology and life sciences, and ABI/Inform for business and management. For lists of the best databases to use in your area of study, go to the main library webpage and look for a subject research guide. There will be one for every major at Ithaca College, and there are many for specific courses and special topics.

At the Ithaca College Library, periodical databases are interconnected so that you can more easily look for full text articles online. Keep in mind that although a high percentage of articles will be available online, not all will be. The primary function of the periodical databases is to index the articles. Availability of full text or page images of the articles is subject to contracts and agreements between vendors and publishers. Fortunately, in this online era, for articles that are not immediately available online or in paper or microform in the library, an interlibrary document delivery system can usually get you the full text of the article for free within 48 hours (time is an average, and can't be guaranteed, unfortunately).

Web search engines such Google and Yahoo are probably very familiar to you. Although they can be good for simple searches, such as finding answers to crossword puzzle clues, they shouldn't be primary tools for doing research projects, since so little of the research literature is publicly available and therefore accessible through a search engine. Instead you should concentrate on the periodical databases available through the library.

Not to be confused with the main Google search engine, are two related Google search tools.

Google Books is a collection of books in the public domain that Google, in cooperation with several large university libraries, has scanned. Because of copyright laws, most books that are available for full viewing are more than seventy years old. For some topics this is not a problem; for others it is pretty useless. You can specifically search Google Books, but a regular Google search will include Google Books result mixed in the list.

Google Scholar is a separate search engine for a broad range of research areas. Regular Google searches will not include Google Scholar results. Google Scholar competes with some commercial periodical databases and includes some features not included in some others, such as citation searching (see beloew). In addition to peer-reviewed journal articles, records will include preprints, and technical reports. Results of a Google Scholar search will include Google Books records. Each Google search citation will include a link to the full-text resource provided by the IC Library, when available, but if you click the wrong hyperlink, you may bypass the library connection and be asked to pay to view an article.

An important part of a literature review is determining who are important authors in the field and what are seminal works. Once you have located a book or article, look for the list of bibliographical references. See who is being cited. As you continue to do this, certain authors' names may begin to emerge.

Google Scholar (not the regular Google) has a function that allows you to see how often a work has been cited, with links to those works that have cited it. The number can be one means of determining the importance of the article, and it can be a means of finding related articles that might not show up in a regular database search.

After you have searched and found articles and other resources for your topic, the next step is to evaluate them.