Undertaking a Literature Review: basic principles

1
Undertaking a Literature Review basic principles

• Dr Margaret L Goodman
• Senior Lecturer/Research Facilitator in Practice

2
Why do a literature review?

• To present and synthesise the background to your
  research
• To demonstrate that you have read appropriately
  within your subject area
• To show where your work fits in to existing
  knowledge

3
Purpose of a literature review

• It is not to identify every existing resource
  related to the topic of research
• But rather to identify the most relevant
  resources
• Using your judgement to use or discard a
  particular resources requires some familiarity
  with the general idea of research and methods
  typically employed in that area

4
What kinds of literature?

• Generally speaking, the aim of a literature
  search (which you will need to do for your
  review) is to identify as many items of
  secondary data as possible. Secondary data is
  data that already exists, for example
• books
• journal articles
• conference papers
• reports
• newspapers
• data bases
• published statistics
• videos, films, broadcasts
• electronic databases
• the Internet

5
Stages in the literature review process

• Focus on your question
• Decide on the most appropriate sources
• Perform a scoping search by
• Diving your search into a series of concepts
• Thinking of alternative terms for each concept
• Searching for each concept separately
• Combining concepts using Boolean logic
• Limiting your search
• Revise your search, as necessary, and replicate
  in other sources

6
Natural language

• Uses your own words and searches words phrases
  (typically from the title, abstract keyword
  fields) to retrieve records
• Potentially can search any field of a database
• Can be very precise (but there can be ambiguities
  e.g. moderation of an exam or within reasonable
  limits)
• Some problems
• Plurals e.g. child or children
• Different spellings e.g. faecal or fecal
• Different terminology e.g. pavement or sidewalk
• Prefixes prenatal, pre natal, pre-natal

7
Database features to support natural language

• Truncation (e.g. , ) used to search for
  different word stems and word endings
• use comput to find computer, computers,
  computed, computing etc. (BUT comp would find
  compost!)
• Wild cards (e.g. , ?) use to search for spelling
  variants
• Use leukmia to find leukaemia or leukemia
• Proximity and adjacent operators (e.g. adj or
  near)
• e.g. motor near2 accidents

8

• Proximity
• It is also possible to specify how close together
  your search terms appear, by using w (for within)
  and a number, for the number of words between the
  terms
• e.g. customer w/3 service will retrieve
  customer service, services to customer, and
  services to our customers

9

• Getting unexpectedly few results can be worse
  than getting no results at all
• satisfied but inept!
• Judge not by what you have retrieved but by what
  you may have missed!

10
Evaluating your search strategy
11

• Documenting a search
• Helps to avoid duplication, allows replication in
  future
• e.g. date of search, sources searched, nos. of
  hits, details of strategy etc.
• Reference management
• Reference Manager, EndNote etc.

12
Summary

• Start exploring the literature as soon as
  possible
• Define your topic, and its limits (time/geography
  etc.) scope
• List key words phrases (remember synonyms /
  alt. terms and spellings)
• Identify main search tools and list them
• Acquire / update skills you'll nee to conduct the
  search
• Search for books, journal articles, conference
  papers, theses, reports, statistics. STAY
  RELEVANT
• Keep careful records from the START of your
  search
• Dont disregard serendipity (browsing, scanning,
  even Google)
• Remember that the search hence review is a
  process rather than a product go back to your
  literature review search again at the end of
  your research to check for new articles!
• If you need help ask a librarian!

13
Very good search
14
Good search
15
Poor search