A Guide to Literature Reviews

It is as important to select the right databases as it is to have a good research question - they go hand in hand.

1. Once you've clarified your question, consider the areas or disciplines that factor into the topic. Much of academic research is multidisciplinary and including literature from a variety of 'lenses' enhances your literature review. 
- for example, there may be an economic lens to your question, or a health aspect, or a gender viewpoint -- in addition to the overall discipline you are working in. 

2. You want to consider selecting databases by Subject: 

3. You can also search by Type:

4. You may consider using large, generic databases like ProQuest Databases, EbscoHost, and Google Scholar. These databases contain a wide range of subject databases, which makes them good for an investigative search (are your keywords appropriate, what times of results come up, which specific databases provide results, etc). However, you lose much of the subject-specific functionality with the generic approach, as well as spend more time managing large results than diving into relevant results. 

5. You can also use our Research Guides to search for database suggestions. 

6. Lastly, the Teaching and Learning team can help you decide on and use discipline-specific resources and search strategies. You can book an appointment by emailing libgrad@mcmater.ca.

​​​​​​Keep track of your search terms and databases searched!

• From the list of results, review the abstracts of relevant articles to decide if that article is going to be useful/ relevant to your search.
• Make note of the searches you conduct in each database so that you may duplicate them if you need to later (or avoid dead-end searches that you have already tried). You can also save your searches within each database, and review them and/or set up Search Alerts. 
• Use 'citation chaining' - go through the references in relevant articles to see if any of them are relevant to your search, and use Google Scholar or Web of Science to see which articles cite the article you are using. 
• Ask your professor/supervisor  if there are scholars or seminal works that you should include in your literature review
• Use a citation manager such as Endnote, Mendeley or Zotero to keep, organize, and share your resources. Ask your librarian for assistance with using these tools.

Some questions to help you analyze the research:

• What was the research question of the study you are reviewing? What were the authors trying to discover?
• Was the research funded by a source that could influence the findings?
• What were the research methodologies? Analyze its literature review, the samples and variables used, the results, and the conclusions. Does the research seem to be complete? Could it have been conducted more soundly? What further questions does it raise?
• If there are conflicting studies, why do you think that is?
• How are the authors viewed in the field? Has this study been cited? if so, how has it been analyzed?

Content created by Carleton's MacOdom Library's "Conducting a literature review" guide