Search Strategy for Literature Review
A literature review is a critical account of the methodologies and data on your research topic by accredited researchers in the field. The following is a list of search techniques to guide the process:
- Identify keywords associated with your topic
- Test your keywords by using them in the recommended databases
- Are your keywords included in the titles?
- If your keywords are not included in the titles, search MeSH to determine what keyword(s) to use
- Also, identify author supplied keywords in the relevant articles you find
- Run keywords search for relevant publications
- Find recommended databases in the Databases tab
- Literature reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, journal articles or books
- Bibliography / References List searches
- scan references sections of these materials to find additional materials
- Identify key journals
- scan table of contents from the past 3-5 years for material
- Identify major authors
- Map the literature
- Organize literature according to key elements of the research studies such as methodology
- Organize sources/materials
- Use an online reference manager like Zotero or Mendeley to organize the materials into folder/sub-folders
