Literature Search Techniques 2 Strategic searching In this

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Literature Search Techniques 2

• Strategic searching

• In this lecture you will learn
• The function of a literature search
• The structure of academic literature
• Revision of the previous lecture
• An overview of search strategies

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1. The function of a literature search
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What is the Purpose of a Literature
Search/Review? (1 Cognitive)

• To avoid reinventing the wheel
• To find out what other scholars are writing about
  your topic
• To learn methods and approaches that are
  appropriate for your study
• To learn appropriate theory to underpin your work

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What is the purpose of a Literature
Search/Review? (2 social)

• To demonstrate to your audience that your
  contribution is new different from everyone
  elses
• Nobody will believe you unless you can
  demonstrate through the literature review that
  you know what everyone else has done
• In an MSc to demonstrate to your teachers that
  you can do an effective literature review
• Because literature reviews are an accepted part
  of university projects/research and your project
  will not look like a good project without one

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What Information Should You Look For?

• Publications that cover the same or a similar
  topic to yours
• Publications that support your methods
• E.g. Stats, Systems Analysis, Database
  Normalisation, Project Management, OO programming
• Background information books
• E.g. The Web, The JAVA programming language,
  electronic security

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2. The structure of academic literature
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Overall Structure
Research Topic
Specialist sub-area
Relevant Primary research
Your research question
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Advanced literature search
Topic 1
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10
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Specialist area
50
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Topic 3
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Topic 2
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Afieldstructure
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3. Revision of the previous lecture
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Sources for Literature Reviews

• The Library
• Look through the list of journals and browse the
  books on the shelves to find relevant ones
• Digital Libraries
• Need to use keyword searches to identify relevant
  articles
• The Web
• Use keyword searches in Google (which indexes PDF
  and PostScript academic publications)

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The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Different
Sources

• Books vs. journal articles vs conference
  proceedings vs. the web
• Which tend to be the best for
• Currency
• Authority
• Understandability?
• Which types of task would each source be best
  for?
• Academic papers are quality controlled many are
  rejected as being incorrect or uninteresting

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Literature search techniques

• Keyword search
• To find topically relevant information from
  digital libraries, databases, or the web
• Good in most cases
• Browsing
• To sift through collections of potentially
  relevant text
• Good where there are many relevant
  books/articles, but only a few can be selected
• Chaining
• Tracking references and citations to find
  articles relevant to a topic
• Good where the topic is very small

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Example search engines

1. Look for web page on search engines read page
2. Look for book on search engines read
   introduction, contents list, look for subtopic
3. Start keyword searching for subtopic in digital
   libraries
4. Chain key authors and papers for subtopic
5. Read the likely papers and pick one as your main
   paper

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Exercise

• Class vote on answers

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(No Transcript)
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4. Overview of search strategies
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Literature search strategy
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Literature search -real?
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Alternative literature search strategy

• A practical strategy?
• Do general searches until you find a paper that
  you think you could understand use it as the
  basis for your research
• Author/reference/citation chain from this paper
• Keyword searches to get papers relevant to
  subtopic

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Alternative literature search strategy
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Your progress

• The following should occur as you progress
• Increase in knowledge of the subject
• Increase in general knowledge of the specialist
  topic
• Increase in your specialist vocabulary
• Increase in confidence that you can complete the
  task

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Homework Task

• Conduct a literature search for your chosen
  sub-area for the second assessment
• Report
• The searches conducted (digital libraries, OPAC
  etc)
• The titles found from each search
• Discuss which types of publication (books,
  journal articles, Web, conference papers) should
  be used to give the different types of
  information needed
• Make a list of problems/issues that arose with
  your search
• You do not need to print out all the articles you
  found