Research Guides: Getting Started on a Great Literature Review: Home

Quick Links

Defining and Staying Within Your Scope

Style and Paper Construction

Finding the Literature to Review

Research Guides have been created to help you find the best databases for research in your subject area. You can find much of the literature for your review by searching these databases.

Search Methods

There are 3 main ways to search, and you will want to use all of them for a comprehensive search of the literature.

1. Keyword Searching

Keyword searching is the default for most people and is probably the technique you feel most comfortable with. There are ways, however, to improve your keyword searches. These tutorials will show you how.

Credo Tutorial: Choosing and Using Keywords
Credo Tutorial: Search Techniques, Part 1
Covers brainstorming keywords, the Boolean operators, use of quotation marks in searching, and nesting search terms.
Tutorial: Search Techniques, Part 2
Covers full-text searching vs. fielded searching, using, truncation/wildcard, an introduction to subject searching, and limiters.

2. Controlled Vocabulary Searching

Controlled vocabulary goes by many names -- subjects, subject headings, subject terms, headings, descriptors, identifiers, and more -- but they are designed to help you quickly find the most relevant literature, regardless of the terminology used by the author.

3. Cited Reference Searching

Cited reference searching allows you to tap into the existing scholarly conversation on your topic.

This functionality is not available in all of our databases. It is, however, available in Google Scholar, and it is one of the search engine's most useful features.