Plan your literature search
Just like conducting a higher degree by research (HDR) project, a comprehensive literature search starts with effective planning. A literature search plan can:
- Ensure your literature searching is comprehensive
- Prompt you to think critically
- Guide your searching to focus on your topic
- Document your search processes to minimise replication over your candidature
- Save time
Research Process
The process of finding, evaluating and selecting literature for your thesis is not linear. You may need to revisit several steps throughout the process to gather information.
The below flowchart provides a visual depiction of the iterative nature of researching, and some reflective questions to guide you.
Flowchart diagram overview
The flowchart depicted includes the following steps:
- Plan your search
- Run your search
- Evaluate your results
- Reflect: Did I find relevant, authoritative information? No = Refine your search then return to step 2. Yes = Move to step 5.
- Start reading and notetaking
- Reflect: What have I discovered? Do I need more information? Yes = Refine your search then return to step 2. No = Move to step 7.
- Start writing
Design your search query
Before searching literature in databases, you need to formulate a search query based on your research topic. A search query is the translation of your research topic into searchable keywords and phrases that can be used in databases and Google Scholar.
Summarise your question or topic
This sounds obvious, but to begin searching you need to be clear about your topic.
Write down a summary of your topic and check that it's clear and focused. This will help guide you in the sort of information you are looking for.
Identify the keywords
Highlight, underline or circle the keywords or main concepts in your summary. These words can help you build your search strategy and set parameters.
Think of alternative search words for each concept
Authors will use different terminology for the same concept so it's important to think of alternative words for each of your concepts. These can be synonyms, related words, abbreviations, acronyms and other words that are specific to your topic.
Doing this will ensure that you don't miss out on any useful articles that you might otherwise miss if you only use one or two search terms.
Boolean operators
Use Boolean operators AND OR, NOT to combine these terms into a meaningful search. These operators are a means of combining search terms to broaden or narrow search results.
AND Use AND to retrieve documents that contain both of the specified search terms.
OR Use the OR search operator to retrieve documents that contain one or both specified search terms
NOT Use the NOT search operator to retrieve documents that do not contact the specified term.
Example search
Follow the example below of how the steps previously outlined have been used in a search planner.
Search planner
To help you in planning and developing your search as well as assisting in keeping track of your searches, download and use the Search Planner document below.