STRUCTURE

How to conduct a literature search

What are you looking for?

At the postgraduate level a literature search is expected to go well beyond a few websites, a couple of relevant textbooks and some past theses, reports or papers that your supervisor has given you. But you are not going to find anything if you don’t know what you are looking for.

One of the purposes of this assignment is training for a research higher degree. You would be expected to be fully up to date with the current state of the art, with other research happening right now in other parts of the world. This won’t be in even the best textbooks because the techniques or developments might be too recent, not yet proven, not widely adopted, etc., textbooks generally describe well established or widely used methods. Even what makes it into textbooks may be distilled or simplified. You need to go back to the original sources to get the details.

It is therefore expected that a research project will extensively cite recent research literature, which will typically be published in technical journals and conference proceedings. However you are encouraged to search far more broadly than that, e.g. information may come from newspapers, correspondence with experts, company reports, or a variety of other less formal means (as well as those mentioned in the first paragraph).

This summary will focus on the academic journal and conference publications, of which there is a vast quantity. It would not be unusual to have 50 such relevant citations in a good honours thesis, or several hundred in a PhD thesis (though this would depend on the nature of the topic).

Finding journal articles

The first port of call should be databases. Most good journals are indexed in databases. There are lots of databases. There will be significant overlap between databases but also significant differences. In choosing a database you should therefore start with ones in the most relevant disciplines, but you should not limit yourself to a single database. At least 3–4 would be recommended. The library has information on the databases they subscribe to, and runs courses on how to use them. Go to

http://www.utas.edu.au/library/study/assignment-support

and click on “Subject guides” to find recommended databases for your discipline, then “A-Z Databases” to find and access the database. Some good engineering ones to start with include

· Compendex,

· Scopus,

· Web of Science,

· IEEE Xplore,

· INSPEC.

“Google scholar” is also a good place to look, don’t dismiss it, but is unlikely to be as comprehensive as the relevant databases that the library subscribes to.

Refining your search

Getting the right key words can be a challenge. To begin with you will probably get either 2 hits or 200,000. Don’t be discouraged. Try other combinations. Try American or English spellings. Use AND and OR to narrow or broaden your search. Use brackets to nest your logical statements. Put things in quotes if you want them to appear exactly at typed, especially phrases of more than one word. Use wildcards, e.g. to allow singular or plural alternatives, or other different word endings.

For example, a search for “fatigue” will get numerous hits from the medical research literature, but “fatigue and (steel or alumin*)” will get more relevant hits. Note that “alumin*” captures capture British and American spellings “aluminium” and “aluminum”.

Once you have found one or two articles, read them and get to know the jargon that they use, see what words or terms recur often. This could provide a good source of new key words to try. As you find (and read) more relevant articles you will learn more of the language and be able to refine your searches further.

Finding more articles

Databases certainly aren’t the only good way to locate articles, and subject keywords aren’t the only way to get good information out of them.

Going backwards in time: All articles have a bibliography. If you find a good paper look at its bibliography to see if there are other relevant articles. You only have the title to go on but you can use your databases to obtain its abstract. Check for papers that reappear in several bibliographies. If a paper is cited often this may indicate that it is a seminal or landmark paper, in which case you really must be familiar with it.

Going forwards in time: If you find a good paper you can use the databases to search for more recent papers that cite it. Do this for any relevant paper you find. Also do it if you identify a landmark paper (see previous paragraph). This will keep you up to date with recent developments in that field.

Look for key authors, active institutions, and relevant journals. If a particular journal, a particular author’s name or an institution appears frequently in your searches and looks like it is relevant you can do two things:

· Use them as search terms in your database.

· Look up their websites. You can browse through the table of contents and read paper abstracts for any journal (and sometimes even download the paper). Individual authors (particularly if academics at another university) may have their own home page which often contains a complete list of their publications, some of which may not be contained in the mainstream databases. Institution websites may also list publications, or at the very least will provide names of other important researchers.

Look at conferences, particularly if your topic is in a fast moving field. Conference papers are not always as complete or rigorous as journal papers but the short publication lead times mean they often contain the most recent developments. Conferences often publish work in progress, new ideas that haven’t yet been fully tested, or summaries of work in a given area. Look up the conference website. Conference papers are sometimes free too.

Obtaining the articles that you have found

The UTas library subscribes to many of the journals you will come across, though these days they are moving more towards electronic subscriptions. However you will probably find many articles in Journals that we do not have (well over half in some fields).

The university has a system called “document delivery”, which enables you to get copies of almost any article you are likely to want from other libraries, typically within a week if it can be obtained within Australia. The next section has details on how to sign up for this and order articles. You should also talk to your supervisor and/or library staff.

Finally, you can sometimes download articles for free from the author’s home page.

Document delivery requests

Go to the library home page http://www.utas.edu.au/library and scroll down a bit and you will see “document delivery” (circled in the figure below) under the “For researchers” heading.

Click on this, then on the link “Document Delivery”, then either “Register” if you are new or (just below this) “Request” if you are already registered, i.e.

and or .

Enter your User ID and Password (these are probably not your normal login details, e.g. the User ID is usually your student ID).

When the following screen comes up, click on the link to “Create Request” in the menu at the left (circled in the figure below).This is not so obvious, but it is to encourage you to look in the UTas catalogues before making a request.

At this point the screen below should come up. Enter as many details as you can – the more you enter the easier it is for them to find – and click on request. Journal articles are usually scanned and emailed, so the pickup location is not relevant. The service is pretty good, particularly if the document is available within Australia and it is not a busy time of year. There is usually no need to make a “RUSH” request – my last request (a standard one) arrived within 24 hours.

Mostly you will be ordering journal or conference articles, which are normally scanned and emailed to you so you have it permanently. With books you are given a reasonably generous loan period, but that is determined by the library issuing the book. Some may allow renewals. If you need the book for much longer (e.g. you want it for the whole year) then you should talk to your supervisor about whether they or the library should purchase a copy.