LITERATURE REVIEW RESEARCH

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INTRODUCTION

Hi! I’m Kira.

Today I’ll be showing you how to use the library to find resources for your literature review.

I’ll approach this in two different ways.

First, I will demonstrate how to run keyword searches in library databases to find articles or studies on
your topic. I’ll show you how to sift through the available literature to find studies or articles that
support your thesis.
Second, I’ll show you how to search for existing literature reviews and use reference lists to find articles
or authors that appear repeatedly in different articles. This method follows the trail of existing research
to identify important or groundbreaking articles on your subject. You may also want to consider
including the names of some of the prominent educators, researchers, or theorists who work in your
field. The goal of this search is to discover what articles or studies are often being discussed or
referenced. This will indicate a work you may want to explore further, and include in your literature
review.

As you run your searches, you may want to keep a Word document open, to keep track of promising
articles and new keywords or subject terms.

For this example, let’s say you are trying to research this topic:
The impact of social anxiety on learning in middle school students.

KEYWORDS

Let’s start by breaking this sentence into keywords. We use keywords when searching library databases.
If you’re not sure what keywords are, please watch this tutorial!

LIBRARY SEARCH USING KEYWORDS

We also want to include synonyms for our keywords. So, I’ll type:

• Social anxiety

in the first search box, followed by

• Middle school (and all relevant synonyms, for example: Junior High OR Intermediate Grades )

In the third box, let’s use two similar terms, synonyms:

• Education OR learning
The first search returns about 12,000 results. Some of them look promising, but I immediately see one
that returned “social media” because the database grabbed the word “social” from the search terms. To
search by the phrase “social anxiety”, I’ll put it in quotes, which will search these two words as a phrase,
instead of as separate, individual words. This will narrow the results significantly.

When I look closer at these results, I see that I want to narrow the search even further, so they are more
relevant, so I’ll use this dropdown tab on the right-hand side, and select “SU Subject Term” – this is
called field searching.

Field searching limits the results to a certain category. For instance, you can limit by author name (AU),
or title (TI). By selecting Subject term, we’re requiring that all items be categorized as having to do with
the subject “social anxiety”. You can find subject headings for each article underneath the title and
other citation information.

Great! Now our results are significantly smaller, and also much more relevant!
Here’s a tip: Find a relevant result, and then look at its subject headings. You can choose one those
headings to run another search, which will bring up similar articles.
Also, use the limiters on the left-hand side of the screen. It’s like shopping. You tell the database you
want to look only for articles within a certain date range, like the last 8 years for example. You also let it
know that you want to see results from only scholarly or peer-reviewed journals.
Searching for your literature review is kind of like a game. You’ll want to play around with different
keywords, subject terms, and use field searching, and see what kind of results you get each time. Each
search will yield slightly different results. Some results will seem way off, others will return more precise
results. Hang in there! If you feel yourself getting frustrated, take a break! And remember, you can
always reach out to the library for help.

SEARCHING FOR LITERATURE REVIEWS

Earlier, I mentioned we wanted to look for pre-existing literature reviews, so let’s do that now. Let’s try
including the words

• literature review

in our search. In an ideal world, adding this into our search would bring up articles that review existing
literature, but more often than not, adding this term will return too few results, and these may not be
relevant at all. If this happens, which is the case in this example, broaden your search by deleting some
of your other keywords. We’ll change our search to include only “social anxiety” and some keywords
that describe young people (for instance: children OR adolescents OR youth OR child OR teenager) with
“literature review” and see what we get.
Let’s further limit our results by requiring “literature review” to appear in the title (TI) or the subject
(SU).

Here’s a good example of a result with a literature review.

[Norton, A. R., & Abbott, M. J. (2016). Self-Focused cognition in social anxiety: A review of the
theoretical and empirical literature. Behaviour Change, 33(1), 44. doi:10.1017/bec.2016.2]

In general, once your results start looking pretty good, you’ll want to view the articles and scan through
them to look for:

• a literature review section,

• a paragraph discussing existing literature , which is usually in the Introduction, or

• the references list

Write down any citations that look interesting and relevant to your topic, and save these citations in
your Word document, or jot them down on a piece of paper to look up later. You’ll be doing this process
many times, so remember to note any titles or authors who turn up repeatedly. These are great jumping
off points for other searches. It’s a good idea to give yourself plenty of quiet time to run these searches.

GOOGLE SCHOLAR

As someone already familiar with your field, you probably know the names of prominent researchers
who study what you are interested in. You may want to include their names (use the AU author field) in
some of your searches. Also, if you want to find out who else is citing their work, you can discover this
by using Google Scholar.

In this example, I am visiting scholar.google.com, and inputting the keywords: anxiety, children,
Ginsburg – as I know that Gilda Ginsburg researches anxiety in children. Here’s a result -- (Social anxiety
in children with anxiety disorders: Relation with social and emotional functioning) – it is older than what
I’m looking for (it was published in 1998), but it’s been cited 394 times. Clicking on this link will bring you
directly to those 394 results, and you can limit further by date range. You may find additional articles
using this method. Bring the author and title information back to the library databases, to check for the
full text of the article.

CONCLUSION

As you continue this research process, you’ll begin to compile the list of resources you want to include
in your literature review. Don’t expect to finish this process quickly. Give yourself plenty of time and
space to really dive and get into the available literature. If you run into difficulties, remember that the
Library and Writing Center are here to support you. We’re a phone call or a quick IM chat away!
Good luck, and keep going!

December 2021