Getting Started
Consider your terminology and subject. Do you know enough about your subject to conduct a basic search? If not, do a brief exploratory Google search to get your bearings and identify the terminology you’ll need in order to do a more targeted search in the library database.
After that, you can start with a broad search in the Discovery service on the Library’s main website. This can feel very overwhelming – depending on your subject, this may return hundreds of thousands of results! You might be thinking, how do I even start to narrow it down? There are a few tricks you can use to find the results that work best for you!
During your broad search, try to apply some limiters to narrow the results to about 200 results – you can do this by combining search terms in the advanced search feature, restrict for date, geography, or more! Try to apply one limiter at a time so you don’t suddenly end up with only a handful of results.
In that narrower field of results, identify a few articles that seem like they are most relevant. You can look at which journals they were published in to identify key journals, subject headings that have been applied to them for search terms you may not have considered, and the authors of these articles, as often researchers will build on their own research! You can use these as jumping off points for more controlled research afterwards.
This approach is an information gathering technique called Browsing.
While browsing, you may find an article that responds to all your criteria; from there, look at their bibliography–the work that they are building on will be here for you to assess to see if it belongs in your own literature review!
These articles might mention seminal works, key researchers, or other critical elements that you will need to include in your literature review. You can also look the article up in Google Scholar to see which articles have since referenced it in their own research, allowing you to see its place in the field and work from there.
This technique is an information gathering technique called Pearl Growing, where you work outwards from a single article to gather more sources for your research.
Make sure you record your research process. Which search terms did you use? Which types of results were returned? This helps ensure that you don’t repeat labour that you’ve already done, ultimately wasting your time! It also helps you understand when it's time to stop searching.
You might be sitting here now wondering how you stop a search, especially using a combination of browsing and pearl growing! If you find you’re starting to consistently find the same authors and articles or the same opinions, that’s a good indicator that you have exhausted the field!
On the other hand, if no matter what you do you continue to add to a list of articles that seems to be never ending, consider narrowing your area of research! It is possible to take an approach that is too broad to do an accurate literature review that accurately reflects the scope of the field.