There is no one way to search the literature to find the most important sources related to your topic. However, there are some steps and habits of mind you can use to make the process more effective and efficient.
- Spend some time brainstorming both possible narrower or related aspects of your topic, and developing a list of possible search terms: Brainstorm your topic and background reading with Wikipedia.
- Approach your topic with an open and critical mind: be mindful of your own worldview and how innate human biases can blind us to some things.
- Give some thought to what kinds of sources will be useful to you. While scholarly journal articles and books (sometimes called monographs) will make up the meat of your literature review, some topics may lend themselves to other types of sources such as government or non-governmental reports and white papers, data sets, conference proceedings, and more: Publication Types. See also: Finding & working with Scholarly Sources.
- What you type into a search box will depend both on your topic and what search tool (database) you are using. For example, if I'm using the OneSearch (which searches many collections across all disciplines at once) to look for sources on stress among nurses, I might start with a search like this: stress AND nursing. However, if I'm using the CINAHL search tool (searches just the nursing literature) instead, I might not need to include 'nursing' in my search at all. Here are some general search tips:
- ONLY type in words or phrases that concisely describe main concepts, with AND between each concept (does not need to be capitalized).
- opioids AND treatment
- diversity AND Microsoft AND training
- Put double quotes around exact phrases of 2+ words.
- “diversity training”
- "Black Lives Matter"
- Craft multiple searches to see what works and find the best results
- opioids AND teenagers AND prevention
- "prescription drugs" AND adolescents AND prevention
- "opioid epidemic" AND adolescents AND "prevention programs"
- Try multiple search tools.
- OneSearch (search box on the library home page) can be useful in many contexts, but isn't always the most accurate way to search the literature. It also doesn't search everything (such as the Dissertations & Theses database, some EBooks, and most videos)
- Explore the Subject Guides (link in lower left of library home page) for relevant discipline-specific search tools and portals into reliable open Web sources.
- Search inside the full-text of EBook content via EBook Central.
- Explore non-traditional sources, such as:
- Use Reference Mining to explore the relevant literature
- Reference Mining is the process of looking carefully at the list of cited references at the end of a relatively recent journal article directly related to your topic. Chances are, the author has done some of the leg work in identifying reliable, relevant sources and listed then in their bibliography. If you see something useful in a bibliography, copy-paste the title and use the library's OneSearch to locate it.
- If you find an article or book chapter you need that is not accessible via the library, you can request via Inter-library Loan (note: you cannot request entire books).
