Tips and Tricks for Literature Searches
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Tips and Tricks for Literature Searches
Time is a precious commodity, and as a doctoral student you are keenly aware of its value. You are expected to be thorough and exhaustive in your search for academic resources. These expectations don’t only exist so you can avoid duplicating existing research; they also empower and prepare you to contribute to the foundations of thinking and practice in your chosen area of interest. One key to meeting these expectations is to develop proficiency in online searching.
Share your tips and suggestions for finding relevant academic literature. These tips may relate to navigating particular electronic databases, applying general searching techniques, constructing search term queries, broadening or narrowing your initial search results, finding monographs and other resources, or other topics.
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With these thoughts in mind:
Post your two best tips by Day 3, giving priority to suggestions that have not been posted by your colleagues.
SAMPLE ANSWER
Tips and Tricks for Literature Searches
Having the right skills to navigate through databases and search engines in order to come up with relevant literature on a particular is a crucial necessity in developing a quality research. While the internet has a plethora of books, journals, newspapers, reviews, case studies, and even monographs, finding the correct resource that contains the most relevant information to a given topic is a daunting task (Boell, & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2014). However, there are various tips and tricks that can be applied to ensure this exercise turns out successful.
The first step to getting relevant sources in any search engine or database involves identifying the key search terms, also referred to as the keywords. Eliminating such superficial words as conjunctions, transitional words, and even prepositions will help specify the search results (Sharma, 2013). While searching for sources, it is imperative that one starts with online databases, such as ProQuest, EBSCOhost, Emerald Insight, and Worldcat, among many others. These databases usually contain authentic sources that have been published by authors. To get better results, streamlining search options to peer-reviewed PDF sources may just play the trick, since most of these are journal articles that are current and authentic.
The most common tool that people use to conduct searches is the search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing among others. However, caution should be taken not to over-rely on these engines, since they give duplicate results, as well as those that are not authentic. When such results come up, one should avoid .com sites, YouTube, blogs, and online Wikis. Instead, it would be helpful to do an advanced search, and specify the year range, document type (PDF), and other specifications that differ from one search engine to the other. Summarily, one should look for those search results that capture at least three-quarters of the key search terms.
References
Boell, S. K., & Cecez-Kecmanovic, D. (2014). A Hermeneutic Approach for Conducting Literature Reviews and Literature Searches. Communications Of The Association For Information Systems,34257-286. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.646.8920&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Sharma, P. (2013). Reflections on medical literature searches. Transfusion, 53(8), 1858-1861.
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