5.2: How to do a Literature Review

Learning Objectives

1. Describe and use several methods for finding previous research on a particular research idea or question.
2. Ability to find several peer-reviewed, empirical research articles topics related to your research questions.

Refresh

Before we begin learning tips and tricks for finding academic research reports, let's review what we learned in Chapter 2 (Overview of the Scientific Method) in the first section literature reviews (2.3.1: Research Literature). You are encouraged to answer the questions in Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\) on your own, the click on the link to see how close your answers were. If you choose not to engage with Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\), you should at least read the answers so that you are reminded of what you learned in previously.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

1. Without looking up the definition, describe what a literature review is.
2. Why are literature reviews important for any research study?
3. Without looking up the definition, describe what an empirical research report or a primary source is.
4. How are secondary sources different from primary sources?
5. What is peer review, and why is it importnat for science?

Answer

1. The definition is "Finding and reading previous research and summaries about a specific topic;" was your description close?
2. Literature reviews are important so that you can avoid replicating what others have already. Additionally, literature reviews provide examples of measures and research designs that have already been used successfully. New research should extend knowledge on a topic, but every new study does not have to reinvent every aspect of the design.
3. The definition of an empirical research report is "A type of research literature that reports on studies in which the authors analyzed data", and the definition of a primary source is "An original document; in research, an article in which the authors collected and analyzed their own data;" was your description close?
4. A secondary source is defined as "A variety of documents that summarize others' research or thoughts," while a primary source is the original researchers' results.
5. Peer review is defined as "In research publishing, a system of evaluation in which experts in the field volunteer to review research manuscript drafts to determine if the manuscript should be published, revised, or rejected." Peer review is important because it is an attempt to ensure that only high-quality scientific studies are published and shared with the research community.

Using Your Library's Academic Databases

The primary method used to search the research literature involves using one or more electronic databases. There are several databases that allow you search in multiple other databases at the same time, and these include Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, JSTOR, and ProQuest; Dr. MO's librarian suggests EBSCOhost for social science research. Here's a "how-to" video for EBSCOhost (EBSCO, 2025, found at Taft College's Databases Library Guide on EBSCOhost, which has more resources for EBSCOhost), but videos for other databases are just a quick online search away!

Then, you search within these databases for general as well as discipline-specific databases. For disciplines, you might want to look in APA PsychArticles, CINAHL (for nursing and allied health), Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition (not the consumer addition), MEDLINE, Military and Government Collection (for criminal justice topics), and Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection. To ensure that you learn about research on all people, you might also want to review something like the Ethnic Diversity Source. Your library may have access to even more databases, so you are encouraged to talk with your librarian to learn more! These databases cost you college money, so you can only access them through your school's library.

While each database is organized slightly differently, they all consist of individual records for each article, video, link, or book in the database. Each record includes basic publication information, an abstract (summary of the work), key words (called "subjects," which are an index of terms that describe the contents of the article). The index terms are especially helpful because they are standardized; for example, research on note-taking is always indexed under the term “Learning Strategies.”

You use the databases by entering one or more search terms, then the database returns records that contain those search terms. (These interfaces are provided by different vendors and therefore can look somewhat different depending on the library you use.) Your search words are in bold in the record. The key word section (Subjects) can help you identify if you are using the wrong work for your topic. Given that there are millions, even billions, of records in these databases, you may have to try a variety of search terms in different combinations and at different levels of specificity before you find what you are looking for. Imagine, for example, that you are interested in the question of how using social media is related to stress and mental health. If you were to enter the search term “stress,” it would return far too many records to look through individually. Your first step would be to look at the key words, to see if we are using the correct terminology. When searching "stress," it looks like "psychological stress" is the standardized term. Sometimes, finding these terms takes a lot of time and guesswork! This is why your secondary sources may be beneficial (to provide lots of different words for the same construct). Your librarian is also an expert on databases and terminology, and the love to help!

Library Guides

Your librarian has probably already helped you! Go to your library's homepage and see if you can find Library Guides. These are little pages to provide quick info. At Dr. MO's college, there are at least two relevant Library Guides (sometimes called LibGuides):

• What is a literature review?
• What is a database?

What to Search

When you do a literature review, you need to be selective. Not every article relates to your research idea will be worth obtaining, reading, and integrating into your review. Instead, you want to focus on sources that help you do four basic things: (a) refine your research question, (b) identify appropriate research methods, (c) place your research in the context of previous research, and (d) write an effective research report. Several basic principles can help you find the most useful sources.

First, it is best to focus on recent research, keeping in mind that what counts as recent depends on the topic. A good general rule, however, is to start with sources published in the past five years. The main exception to this rule would be classic articles that turn up in the reference list of nearly every other source. If other researchers think that this work is important, even though it is old, then, by all means, you should include it in your review.

Second, you should look for review articles on your topic because they will provide a useful overview of it—often discussing important definitions, results, theories, trends, and controversies—giving you a good sense of where your own research fits into the literature. HOWEVER, some professors won't allow review articles as part of your own literature review. While they are great secondary sources and can help you with terminology and finding other sources (see their referenes), they are not primary source, empirical articles. These secondary sources can also include reports that provide information that can help you argue for the interestingness of your research question. For a study on the effects of cell phone use on driving ability, for example, you might look for information about how widespread cell phone use is, how frequent and costly motor vehicle crashes are, and so on. You can then go find the original articles provided in the review.

Third, read what others have read. You should look for empirical research reports addressing your question or similar questions, which can give you ideas about how to measure your variables and collect your data. As a general rule, it is good to use methods that others have already used successfully unless you have good reasons not to.

One key tip for doing these searches is to write down every set of terms that you search, with how many records were returned.

Record every set of terms that you search! You'll thank me later!

Literature reviews take hours, sometimes over multiple days, which makes it unlikely that you'll remember every search term that you used. Instead, keep a running list of what terms and combinations of terms that you searched (and how many records were returned). As you search, you will add terminology to your list as you review abstracts and key words. You may also run across a sub-topic that you're particularly interested in (or several sub-topics!), which will results in more terms to add to your list. As you add terms to your list, you'll need to search for combinations with the original and new terms. See how it can get complicated quickly!

Researchers and librarians have found that you need to find about three articles for every one article that you will actually work for your final literature review. If your professor is asking for at least five empirical articles, then you should keep searching the databases until you have terms that result in about 15 empirical articles. You may think that five empirical articles is a lot, the average number of sources cited per article is about 50 (Adair & Vohra, 2003). As you start reading through your 15 empirical articles, you'll realize that some aren't on the exact topic that you ended up with, some may be too difficult for you to understand at this point, and some may not actually be empirical articles (and are instead secondary sources). Dr. MO tries asks her students to find 10-30 articles for literature reviews that required three to five empirical articles. In her experience, students who find fewer than 10 articles have to repeat their literature search once they start reading the articles. And more than 30 articles just seems like too many to read even the titles and abstracts; who has time for that?

Accessing Articles

Once you've found 10-30 research articles, you should start saving them for later use. While your list of key terms will help, you don't really want to recreate your literature review to re-find the articles. Depending on the vendor that provides the interface to the databases, you may be able to save, print, or e-mail the relevant records or even the whole article. To only search for records that contain full-text copies of the works themselves, there should be a filter option for "Full Text". If your library does not have access to an electronic version of the article, you still have options!

The first place that Dr. MO goes is to here librarian for an inter-libray loan. If the articles are available at other libraries, the librarian can usually get a PDF of the article within hours to a few days. If you are looking for a book, that can take up to a few weeks. Another option is to ask someone who goes to (or works at) a bigger or more research-oriented school; the libraries at those types of institutions have access to more databases so your article may be available. Dr. MO did this when one of her professor friends was back at school to get a doctorate; Dr. MO sent the publication information (from her literature review) to her friend, who searched in her university's libary database and found that her university had a PDF of the article! Other ways to access articles for free are listed below; these are great options for getting access to an article that you want but they are not a good way to do a literature review.

Other Ways to Access Articles

• Free journal access from APA: https://www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/sample/
• General online search or use Google scholar
• Openly licensed research article repositories:
  • Scientific Electronic Library Online for openly licensed research articles: https://scielo.org/en/
  • https://www.refseek.com/
  • https://link.springer.com/
  • https://www.science.gov/

CAUTION: These options may provide sources that aren't peer-reviewed and aren't primary source (empirical) articles.

Why aren't these good options for doing your literature review (rather than the complicated databases)? Because the databases are designed to provide peer-reviewed articles, and the abstracts can help you determine if the article is actually a primary source (empirical). These other options don't usually provide these options.

This tutorial explains how to use advanced features of Google Scholar. https://youtu.be/t1ZwgDeX2eQ

From Finding to Reading

The next section gives suggestions and advice for actually reading one of the empirical articles that you found during your literature review.

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References

Adair, J. G., & Vohra, N. (2003). The explosion of knowledge, references, and citations: Psychology’s unique response to a crisis. American Psychologist, 58, 15–23.

EBSCO (2025). Advanced searching on EBSCOhost: Tutorial. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/355538515

Taft College (2025, February 25). EBSCOhost databases. Databases Library Guide. https://lib.taftcollege.edu/databases/ebsco