Define your area of interest using more general literature
- Are there existing Literature Reviews?
- Search UW catalog using terms "methods" or "research" or "bibliography" in conjunction with terms for your topic
- Search Interdisciplinary Tools for review articles
- Search Discipline-specific databases using terms such as "Literature review," "Bibliographic essay.
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- Select your source databases
- Visit the Libraries' Research Guides to see what databases are recommended for your field
- Use OCLC for comprehensive book searches, if books are important in your field
- Indexing only, or full-text databases: be sure that you are not missing older data
- What is in an index? Chapters from books? Only journal articles? Popular interpretations, news reports?
- Citation databases, like Social Science Citation Index: allow citation tracing to determine important research
- Web of Science - Use the "times cited" feature and "cited reference search" to narrow your literature review; create a "citation report" on your literature review topic
- Google Scholar - Use the advanced search feature to limit by publication date, journal, author, discipline; use the "cited by" and "related articles" feature to connect to other scholars
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- Discipline-specific databases will provide more useful information than aggregated databases, like Academic Search Complete
- Choose search terms
- Become familiar with the terms used in your databases
- In EBSCO databases, click "Choose Databases" to refine your literature search to disciplines
- Within your database, click on section indicating terms, e.g. Thesaurus (Eric), Index -- Subject Descriptors (EconLit) or MESH (Medline)
- For book searching, become familiar with the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Start with a keyword search, and find a book that is on your topic, look at the Subject Headings and click on them to refine your search, or find similar items.
- Define criteria for relevance
- What is the scope of the empirical materials you are searching for? Subjects, date ranges etc.
- What languages are important to your field. Are you using search terms that catch those languages?
- Define criteria for methodology
- What are the possible methodologies you might employ, do they fall within a discipline, interdisciplinary?
- What are the specialized disciplinary sources for this methodology?