How to start a literature review - 3 tips for postgrads going back to university

Searching for academic literature can sometimes be a challenge. You’re looking around online, wandering what’s relevant and what’s not, hours go by and you’re getting increasingly frustrated.

Don’t worry, by the end of this blogpost, you’ll be able to do an initial literature search that will take less than 5 minutes! I’m going to share with you three top tips for finding valid, relevant items to use in your essays, presentations, dissertations and other assignments: noun spotting, not just Googling it, and Advanced Search.

(1) Noun spotting

Take the question or title of the assignment you’re working on – or your dissertation - and pick out the nouns: the words and terms that represent people, places or things.

For example, lets take a look at this assignment title:

Critically consider the role of social media platforms in boosting employability among graduates.

The nouns in this assignment title are social media platforms, employability and graduates.

You can use these words as search terms and the best way to search for literature is Google Scholar, which we’ll take a look at next.

(2) Don’t just Google it, Google Scholar it!

Use Google Scholar when searching for literature, rather than general Google. Google Scholar is more likely to return books, papers and articles that are written by academics rather than random people on the internet!

The things you’ll find when you search Google Scholar are also highly likely to have been peer reviewed. This basically means that other academics have scrutinised this literature to make sure it’s accurate and useful, and made suggestions as to how they can be improved before it’s published. It’s like the academic version of quality control. If it’s been peer reviewed, it’s considered scholarly and academically valid. If it hasn’t, it isn’t quite so solid. The stuff you find through a general Google search is much less likely to have been peer reviewed, so for the most part, avoid it!

Anyone can put anything up on the internet, especially on sites like Wikipedia! If you stick to sources from Google Scholar, you’re much less likely to receive that dreaded feedback, “Your sources were not scholarly / academically valid”.

Lets take a look at how you can search for those nouns from our example assignment in Google Scholar.

Open up Google Scholar. Now, lets see if we can find anything pieces of academic literature that have all of these three of our search terms in them. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a book, a journal article or a report that has all three of these in it, because that would be super relevant for our assignment? Let’s try that now. In the search bar type in social media platforms AND employability AND graduates. What comes back? A LOT of results!

How do you narrow this down? Advanced search – which, you guessed it, I’m covering in the next tip.

Supercharge your Google Scholar search with “Advanced Search”

When you have your big long list of search results on the screen, go to the three lines – or the burger as some people call it – in the top left of the screen and select “Advanced search” from the menu.

This little box on the right in the image below will pop up.

The first thing you should try is going to “where my words occur” and selecting “in the title of the article”. This will return items that mention all of your search terms in the title. Lets give that a go. Nothing comes back – we’ve been too specific here so we need to be more broad.

But, we still want to use this “in the title of the article” button, we’re not ready to give up on it yet. What we can do here is start to play around with the words a little. What other exact search terms might we be able to use, which essentially mean the same thing? Okay, we’ve currently got “employability” and “graduates” as separate words. Why don’t we try to combine them into “graduate employability” and give that a go? What we might also want to do is get rid of “platforms” off the end of “social media platforms” because not everybody says “platforms” on the end anymore do they, they just say “social media”. What happens when we type this into the box instead, like this - "graduate employability" AND "social media". We’re going to keep the radio button “in the title of the article” selected and just see what comes back.

Okay, so we have a much smaller number of results here and they all look relevant for our assignment don’t they, so we’re off to a really good start here. We can download these read them, makes some notes and begin to use them to help develop our assignment. We’ve gone from tens of thousands of results down to less than 10 so Advanced Search is a great way of getting really specific really quickly in our literature searches.

Have a play around with Advanced Search and the other things you’re able to select. You can specify particular authors – and that’s something you might want to do next, because the same author name – K Sutherland - has come up a few times in our search results – they might have written other articles or books that focus on this topic and we would certainly want to check those out. You can search by a range of publication dates too to narrow it down further and by the journal the piece of literature was published in.

I have a free one-page PDF guide on the Advanced Search function – which is available in my Free Student Resource Zone,

Give Advanced Search a go, because the less time you spend trawling Google Scholar for literature, the more time you can spend writing your assignments and ensuring that they’re sufficiently critical and analytical.

And that’s it! Those are my three top tips for boosting your literature searches – spot the nouns to use as search terms, use Google Scholar, and use Advanced Search.

For quick, straightforward, easy to implement advice tips and advice to supercharge your studies and boost your grades, subscribe to my weekly emails by clicking on the button below!