Technical skillsSyBBURE SearleJune 15, 2021

Literature search: Get to know what you don’t know

Technical skillsSyBBURE SearleJune 15, 2021

Searching for information: The importance knowing the literature in your field

What is a literature search?

A literature search is the process of looking for the current and historical research/review papers in a particular field of research.

In research you often start with a proposed problem to solve or a question you would like to answer. To answer this question, you will need to find and read papers to help you generate a hypothesis and to ensure that whatever you end up testing or doing has not already been done or that it will be relevant to your field.

How to begin a literature search

Start with your basic research question or topic you need to know more about:

Ask yourself these questions

What am I going to be researching?

What questions will I plan on asking?
What do I need to know more about?
Then try to summarize these answers into a basic research question

Once you have answered these questions generate a list of key words that you can search. (you can start broad and then narrow down based on how many results you get in your first search but you do not want to be too broad or you will get too many irrelevant hits) You can often search more than one Key word at once. For example if you are studying DNA repair in yeast you can type in DNA repair and yeast at the same time so that the papers that come up are more relevant.

Identify useful databases:

Once you decide what you want to search you then need to determine where you want to search.

For literature searches you want to ensure that the material you are reading are published peer reviewed articles. To make sure that you are easily able to find relevant reliable articles you will often have to use a specific database to search.

Some fields of study have their own data bases. Many Biologists use Pub med or google scholar. But there are many databases that can fit specific niches so you may want to go through the databases Vanderbilt has access to https://researchguides.library.vanderbilt.edu/az.php?t=31991 and find what works best for you.

Finding and Organizing papers.

Type your keywords into the database and search
- If you get an overwhelming number of results adjust your search by adding more specific key words or limiting results to the last 5/10 years.
Once you have results decide which ones will be most relevant
Using papers you find to find more papers
- Once you find good papers that are relevant to your topic Uses their references to see if anything referenced in the paper would also be relevant to you.
- Most journals allow you to see the works that cite a specific paper so you can also use that feature to see what other papers might be relevant to you.
Going through the papers that you have found
- Once you have a handful of papers you have found divide them into different categories to help you organize. Some general categories are things like “foundational knowledge” “current new theories” “Methods ideas” etc. You may also want to do your own more specific topical categories but it is important to keep all your papers organized so that it’s easy to find them when you want to read them.

A simple example

You are trying to determine the effects of sleep deprivation on appetite in mice and you would like to get some background on the topic before you design your experiments.

Starting your search:

Identify the research question: “what are the effects of sleep deprivation on appetite”
Identify key searchable words: sleep deprivation, mice , diet/appetite (you would not want to just do appetite or just sleep deprivation because you would get too many irrelevant hits)
Go to the database of choice and start searching (Usually pub med is good for biological questions like this.

Questions to answer as you search