Do you need a just few good articles, or do you need to be comprehensive? Developing a search strategy is a balance between needing a very precise search that yields fewer highly relevant results or a comprehensive search (high retrieval) with lower precision. If you are doing an annotated bibliography, you should aim for precision. For a dissertation or thesis, your goal is thoroughness, so you should aim for high retrieval.
Library databases are an important tool for searching the literature because they
How do you choose from the hundreds of databases we have?
Google Scholar is a popular tool for searching and should be included for a comprehensive search because it
The 5-minute video below demonstrates how to build a search strategy.
The following 2-minute video shows how to incorporate phrase searching and truncation into your search strategy.
Too many results?
Too few results?
Also use these strategies to ensure that you have conducted a thorough literature search.
Citation searching is a useful way to discover relevant research by looking at what authors have cited and who has cited that their work. This 4-minute video from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater demonstrates how citation searching can contribute to a literature review.
Try directly searching key journals through the publisher's web site, especially if the journals are not indexed by the databases. You may discover newly published articles that have not appeared in the databases yet.
Some databases provide a link to related records leading you to articles that share cited references with the article you're examining. Don't worry about the large number of results that come up. The list is sorted by the number of shared reference in common, and the more relevant articles are near the top. The video below shows how to find related records in Web of Science.
Make sure you have found the seminal works or influential researchers for your area. Often, these landmark publications were published quite some time ago, so you may easily miss them if you have set date limits on your search.
Grey literature encompasses materials that are produced outside the traditional publishing channels and includes conference proceedings, dissertations, preprints, research reports, white papers, etc.
This 3-minute video from Western University (Ontario, Canada) describes what grey literature is and how it can useful for your research.
While some library databases include grey literature, you will need to search the web sites of government agencies, non-governmental organizations, research centers, think tanks, etc. for comprehensiveness.
A research project can take several months, so it's important to keep up with the most current research on your topic. Consider setting up RSS feeds or email alerts for
Many databases allow you to create email alerts for updated search results, the table of contents from the latest journal issue, or if an article has been recently cited. The links below lead to instructions for some of the more commonly used database interfaces. Contact your subject librarian if you need assistance.
Browzine is a tool that enables you to browse, read, and monitor the content of journals subscribed by UT Libraries. The 2.5-minute video below demonstrates how to set up, organize, and monitor your bookshelf.