Literature Review

SEARCH RELEVANT PAPERS

1. Define your topic. Do you have central question you want to answer?

2. Narrow down what you want to research. Can you focus more deeply, rather than skimming the surface of your topic?

3. Structure your topic into key concepts ( themes) to make it easier to search and look up information

4. Use your learning material to identify key authors or theories that relate to the themes and make them your starting point

5. Do your learning material suggest any further reading? If so, track it down

6. Use an online library and open repositories to locate academic opinion and theory

7. Use search engine for scientific literature (academic research database):

• Scopus is one of the two big commercial, bibliographic databases that cover scholarly literature from almost any discipline. Beside searching for research articles, Scopus also provides academic journal rankings, author profiles, and an h-index calculator.

• Web of Science also known as Web of Knowledge is the second big bibliographic database. Usually, academic institutions provide either access to Web of Science or Scopus on their campus network for free

• For education sciences, ERIC is the number one destination. ERIC stands for Education Resources Information Center, and is a database that specifically hosts education-related literature.

• IEEE Xplore is the leading academic database in the field of engineering and computer science. It's not only journal articles, but also conference papers, standards and books that can be search for.

• ScienceDirect is the gateway to the millions of academic articles published by Elsevier. 2,500 journals and more than 40,000 e-books can be searched via a single interface.

• The DOAJ is very special academic database since all the articles indexed are open access and can be accessed freely of charge.

• Google Scholar is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines.

• Microsoft Academic takes a different approach and generates for each paper that is indexed an overview page that allows to easily explore top citing articles and references of the article

• CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open access research papers.

• Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need any more to query all those resources separately!

• Semantic Scholar is the new kid on the block. It's mission is to provide more relevant and impactful search results using AI powered algorithms that find hidden connections and links between research topics.
  

ORGANIZE YOUR OWN LIBRARY Use the browser extension to import automatically your paper into your digital library, then:

1. Organise your literature using a scientific content manager (Mendeley, Zotero, Paperpile): store any paper copies in folders and files, grouped into themes

2. Read and annotate the literature you have sourced

3. Establish a criteria including a code system to tag only relevant literature

4. Tag only the relevant literature using the key themes you have identified