First in a (no doubt about it) ongoing series. When I had to do my first literature review, and my first big grad school paper, last fall, I asked my mentor, The Indomitable Cassidy, for her advice. Here's what she said:
- I actually like starting with a "haphazard search," but I prefer to start in the e-research tools box, rather than the e-journals box. As you may already know, if you click on the Information and Library Science subject area, you will get various resources, such as LISA, Library Lit, and ACM Digital Lib. It would be good to run a general search in each of those databases, just to see what is out there. Then you will have a better vocabulary to go back and do some more thorough searches.
- I also like to do the "follow the citation trail" method, in which you find one good trusty generalist literature review on your subject area, then skim the citations for relevant articles. Go to that lit-review article, read its citation list, and keep following until you really hit a gold mine.
- Also, if you are new to the subject area, it's worth it to grab someone's CV that you know is in that area (such as your professor) and see where she has published. Then you can go directly to that journal and skim for relevant articles.
- Also, don't let yourself get carried away and start reading all the material you come across! You have to be industrious about this--try to make a decision from the abstract on whether or not it will be useful. Use the abstracts to develop a skeleton of your product. Then go back and really read things to flesh out your literature review. (I like to skim things and put a 3x5 card on them saying what topical/methodological area they cover, then put them in piles, then go back and only work on that pile to come up with a cohesive 2-3 paragraphs about that sub-topic or method in my lit. review. Then I work out all the transition material later on.)
- [In answer to my question of her workflow and how she tracked the online pages she found] Actually, I print out all documents that I think might be relevant (from the abstract), then as I read/skim them I make the notes on 3X5s and then sort (so I am sorting the actual documents). And then I write. It's a bit of a tedious project, but it worked for my master's paper. :)
