Academic Research Skills

• You may need to do some exploratory searching of the literature to get a sense of scope, to determine whether you need to narrow or broaden your focus.
• Identify databases that provide the most relevant sources, and identify relevant terms to add to your search strategy.
• Finalize your research question.

• How far back in time will your search go? 
• What types of sources will you include in your literature review? Are you interested in journal articles, books, dissertations/theses, and reports from non-profits or government agencies? This will largely depend on your discipline. 
• Are you focused on finding a particular type of research study (e.g. you only are interested in finding randomized controlled trials)?
• You may find the following worksheet helpful in defining the scope of your review. If you are working as a research assistant, you will want to work through the questions with your faculty supervisor.

• Conduct searches in the published literature via the identified databases. For a list of recommended databases in your field, visit the relevant Subject Guide. Depending on your topic, you may also want to search databases listed on other subject guides (e.g. if your topic is exam stress and nursing students, you might look at the databases listed on both the Nursing and Education guides).
• Examine the citations of on-point articles for keywords, authors, and previous research (via references). You can also use tools like Google Scholar or Scopus to see who has cited articles since their publication. This process, called citation chaining, is explained in more detail in the following videos (Part 1, Part 2).
• Watch for sources that have been cited many times by other scholars. These are often seminal works—meaning they are considered foundational to the field. Sometimes these articles/books were published many years ago, so if you are using date limits in your Google Scholar or database search you may be excluding them from your results.
• Save your search results in a citation management tool such as Zotero or Mendeley.
• Check with your professor or a librarian to make sure your search has been comprehensive.

• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of individual sources.
• Group your results in to an organizational structure that will support why your research needs to be done, or that provides the answer to your research question.  
• Develop your conclusions.

• Are there gaps in the literature—aspects of the topic where little or no research has been conducted or questions remain? One place to find references to gaps in the literature are in the discussion/conclusions sections of research articles, as authors are expected to identify areas for future research. 
• Who has done significant research on the topic?
• Is there consensus or debate on this topic?
• Which methodological approaches work best for answering the research question?

• Pick an organizational structure, i.e., themes, approaches, concepts, methodologies.
• Organize your citations and focus on your research question and pertinent studies.
• Compile your reference or works cited page.

Note: The first four steps are the best points at which to contact a librarian. Your librarian can help you determine the best databases to use for your topic, assess scope, and formulate a search strategy.

Content adapted from Steps in the Literature Review Process by University of Texas Libraries, CC-BY-NC-2.0