Please also see the following sections of Library Matters: Doing a literature review; Advanced Searching.
This will depend on what you are writing, which may be coursework, or a literature review or systematic review as part of your thesis/dissertation. For coursework, you will probably only need to use some basic search techniques in one or two of our full-text databases to find enough material. A literature review might involve more advanced search techniques and use of indexing databases.
Systematic searching to do a systematic review, or systematic-type review, is much more thorough and structured, and should be reproduceable. It's usually used in health and medicine related subject areas, such as dietetics, nutrition, and psychology. There may be others. It's usually necessary to do some scoping searches, to see what's been published, to help to focus your research question/topic, as well as to review and edit your searches until you have a final systematic search that includes all possible synonyms and index/thesaurus terms. The following document outlines the functionality available in the indexing databases that can help you with systematic searching:
The PICO acronym can help you to both design your research question and to split it back up into parts to be searched:
|
|
Example |
P |
Patient or population and/or problem |
Adults with diabetes type 2 |
I |
Intervention, therapy or treatment |
Ketogenic diet |
C |
Comparison |
Nordic diet |
O |
Outcome |
Weight loss and metabolism |
The Prisma flow diagram available at http://www.prisma-statement.org/ can help you to record your results at each stage of your searching, filtering and screening processes.
You may be pointed towards other guidelines by your course team.
Some databases allow you to see which articles have cited the one that you are reading, and/or have options for you to search directly for citations and analyse the results. Web of Science has several citation features, as explained in the 10-minute video below.