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Research: Your literature review

What is a literature review?

A literature review:

  • Identifies gaps in the literature
  • Avoids reinventing the wheel – it will save time and may stop you from making the same mistakes as others
  • Carries on where others have left off – gives a basis to build on current knowledge
  • Identifies other researchers working in the same field – a good source of networking
  • Increases your breadth of knowledge in your subject area
  • Identifies seminal works in your area
  • Provides the intellectual context for your own work, enabling you to position your project relative to other work carried out  in the area
  • Identifies opposing views
  • Puts your work into perspective
  • Demonstrates that you can access previous work in the area
  • Identifies information, ideas and methods that may be relevant to your research.

Ten simple rules for writing a literature review

Searching for theses

Other sources:

This helpsheet provides more guidance on how to find theses, including those authored by Federation University staff or research students:

Using Google for government documents

Google has some great features for searching for government reports, policies, statistics and other useful documents. Click the button below for details.

  • Use technical or professional terms to get more technical or professional results. For example, when looking for disease statistics, use incidence rather than numbers or statistics (or maybe prevalence might be more relevant).
  • Use (double) quotation marks to define phrases (multiple words found together, rather than separately) - use "whooping cough" to find the exact phrase rather then whooping cough (which might find he started to cough after whooping for joy).
  • Add site:gov.au to restrict results to only government websites.

incidence "whooping cough" site:gov.au

Try it in Google

 

You can also:

  • use site:vic.gov.au to restrict to Victorian government web sites.
  • use a year range to look for years in the results, such as 2012..2015
  • specify the filetype of results (such as only PDF documents).

incidence "whooping cough" site:vic.gov.au 2014..2016 filetype:PDF

Try it:  

You can also use OR for alternative terms (works at the end of the search line):

incidence site:vic.gov.au 2014..2016 filetype:PDF "whooping cough" OR pertussis

Try it:  

Remember about using professional or technical terms to find professional results? Try leaving out whooping cough and only searching for the medical term for the condition, pertussis.

incidence site:vic.gov.au 2014..2016 filetype:PDF pertussis

Try it:  

We can also exclude a search term from our results (similar to using NOT in a database) by putting a hyphen or minus sign in front of the word (or phrase in quotes). For example , to exclude results that include the word Melbourne, we can use -Melbourne

incidence site:vic.gov.au 2014..2016 filetype:PDF pertussis -Melbourne

Try it:  

 

Warning: excluding results that have the word Melbourne will also exclude results that have Melbourne and rural details, or Melbourne and Latrobe Valley

This might not be what you want.

Proximity/Adjacency Operators

These operators are used to retrieve references that contain the specified search terms or phrases within a certain number of words from each other in the same indexed field.
For example:

In EBSCO databases:  tertiary N3 education will find articles containing the phrase education in a tertiary institute as well as articles that contain the phrase tertiary education

Searching tips

Searching is more than just entering key words. Misconceptions about searching can lead to inaccurate search results. For scholarly research, searching is more rigorous and thorough and not always obvious or easy.

Tips for searching:

  • A computer will only search for exactly what you have asked for:
    • Use correct spelling (and check spelling variations e.g. UK versus US)
    • Think of alternative terms for the same concepts
    • Remove punctuation
    • Some words may have multiple meanings (homonyms) or can be used in multiple contexts
    • Databases often use what are called 'stop words', e.g. but, how, or, in , with, to, or what.  These words are ignored in searching for results.
  • No search engine covers all online resources
  • Authors may not use the search terms you are using
  • Descriptors or subject headings are not always consistently applied
  • Each database has its own search methods and tools. Learn what they are to use them to your advantage.

To discuss your search strategy, schedule an appointment with a librarian.

Schedule an appointment

If the times suggested by the scheduler do not suit, please contact libinfo@federation.edu.au or call 1300 552 567 to arrange an appointment at a mutually convenient time.

Health researchers might want to consider a search framework for structuring your search.

Critical appraisal: Evaluating research

Is that publication trustworthy?

Grey, A., Avenell, A., Klein, A. A., & Gunsalus, C. K. (2020). Check for publication integrity before misconduct. Nature, 577(7789), 167–169. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03959-6

Need to critically appraise a randomized controlled trial or a systematic review?

Critical appraisal checklists can be found at:

Useful ebook:

Riegelman, R. K. (2005). Studying a study and testing a test: How to read the medical evidence (5th ed.).

Useful article on appraising qualitative research articles:

Côté, L. (2005). Appraising qualitative research articles in medicine and medical education.

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