Here are her tips on search and preparation for a literature review:

1. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

“When it comes to figuring out what to read, the approach you take will depend on what the
project is. We ask students to come in with maybe three to four questions, and if they’re going to
get good search results, those questions need to be focused. You need to have a clear idea of
what your research statement or problem is; you can’t just have a vague concept – you will lose a
lot of time. I’ve had students come in with searches where the initial statements have been a little
careless. You send through the search results and they say, ‘Oh, well really the question is this.
…’ If you’d known that up front, you would have saved a lot of time.”

2.  It doesn’t matter how you organize, but you must be

organized.
“Actually ‘not organizing’ tends to be how most students start off! One of the things I talk about
is how difficult life will be if you don’t organize in some way. I had a friend who got through a
doctoral program by photocopying articles and highlighting them, and through this mad sorting
process, the paper would kind of emerge.

“But bad things can happen to a good paper if you don’t organize your information. Elsevier’s
Mendeley gives people a lot of options for that. You can use folders, you can have your library
entirely organized by tags, which tells you what you thought was important. It’s very
customizable. You need to find your own way, but you need to organize your information and
your paper.”

3. Know your search strategy.

“When you’re doing an in-depth review of the literature, you need to think about your search
strategy. One thing you can do is think out loud when you’re putting your search together so
you’re aware of the logic of it, where you’ve used ‘and’ or ‘or,’ or other operators. Even though
a database assumes ‘and,’ I sometimes recommend that people include it because it makes the
logic of their search clear.

“You also need to think about how focused a search needs to be. If it’s vague – as I said – you’ll
maybe end up with 10 million results, or 10,000 results that aren’t the right thing. If you’re too
precise, you might not find anything. Some platforms, like ScienceDirect, will have a taxonomy
that helps identify articles with similar concepts but different wordings. In other instances, you
might want to use synonyms to broaden your base. Even if you have a really specific idea of
what you’re looking for – like the effect of a specific nutrient on a specific cell to treat a specific
disease, you will want to do a lot of searches to make sure you’re not missing anything.”