Strangely, many people have asked me for my tips and tricks on literature searching recently. So I thought, hey, I’ll write it down and then point people to the blog instead of describing it again.

This process is intended to produce a relatively comprehensive and systematic review of literature pertaining to your topic or question. It’s a good way to master a new area and locate key articles in a relatively short space of time. It replaces (for me) a lot of fumbling around and hoping I’ve got everything. With this, you won’t get everything but you can be pretty confident you haven’t left anything big out.

This is how it works.

Step One: Choose search strings.
Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. So the first thing to do is identify the area you are searching. Recently, I wrote part of a massive and evil literature review on media literacy, intended to cover all electronic media. I created the following initial search strings:

• “media literacy”
• “television literacy”
• “radio literacy”
• “telephone literacy”
• “film literacy”
• “computer literacy”
• “Internet literacy”

Some of them are stupid, of course (telephone literacy?) but then what do I know about literacy? It was a useful first step, as it turned out.

Step Two: Create initial annotated bibliographies.

This is where computers are really cool. The key tool you need here is EndNote, which LSE provides on its computers and at a rottenly expensive ?70 to its students (but the commercial version is hugely expensive, so what can you do?). Also you need a connection to various academic databases, again which LSE provides.

Then you search for your terms in this general order and export them to EndNote (I’ll explain this in a minute):

1. Books and book chapters. A fabulous way to do this is to use OCLC’s WorldCat, which looks in academic libraries all over the world to see their book listings and brings them to you in exportable format. Lovely. The really great thing about WorldCat is that you get chapter headings for many of the books! So you can finally find that key article in a collected volume. Whoopee! Bad news: the exporting function seems to be really slow and horrible. I’ve found the best way is to export page by page.
2. Articles. I use ISI’s Web of Science as my primary port of call. It indexes everything in the social sciences. But you should also check out the other databases available. Search for your terms, “Mark All” on the list (it’ll do up to 500), go to the “Marked List” page and tick the boxes that say “Abstract” and “Times Cited”. Then export to End Note.

Step Two-A: Exporting to EndNote.
This is cool. Sorry, I just had to say that, because it was a revelation to me when I started to do this. OK: The first thing to do is create a new EndNote file. Call it, for example, media_literacy_ISI. You’ll be creating a lot of EndNote files so a name that includes the search term and the source is helpful. (Also helpful to keep note of what you searched for when in a separate place).

To get the references into EndNote, you first look for the option in your database that says “Export to reference software”. This is on the “marked list” page in ISI and on the search results page in WorldCat. So, press the button. Depending on how your computer is set up, it will either automatically ask you for an EndNote library (point it to the one you just created), or you will have the option to save the results as a file.

If it goes to EndNote automatically, you will be faced with a long list of things called “filters” which makes sure that the bibliography arrives safely, with the author in the author field and not in the title. For WorldCat, choose the “WorldCat” filter from the list; for ISI, choose ISI. Simple.

NOTE: EndNote has lots of filters available, and you can install them (like, I installed a filter for the results from the Digital Dissertations archive). The best place, I’ve found, is the University of Queensland’s library. I love those guys. Also the EndNote site has some, but they are a bit harder to use. It’s pretty difficult to install new filters on the standard LSE configuration because the ‘filters’ folder is locked. If you’re using your own laptop, just save the filter you want to the filters folder and it will show up on the list.

If you saved your results as a file, just choose File/Import, and choose the right filter (as explained above)from the Import Option… list.

Step Three: Print your huge annotated bibliography.
You now probably have several hundred records in your EndNote file. Choose the “Annotated” bibliography format. I print them two pages to a page, double sided. You now have a giant book of abstracts of everything related to your field. It is a horrifying, insuperable amount of information. This is where Step Four comes in.

Step Four: Map your area
I discovered mind-mapping during my MBA, and I swear by it for this particular application. It was developed by Tony Buzan, who wrote a several books about it, and it’s really fairly simple. You basically take the key concepts that you see in your abstracts and link them together visually, one word or phrase per line. Kind of like an outline. So, with “literacy” as my central concept, I had a chain that said “media”, then “purpose”. “Democracy”, “pluralism” and “social justice” were all linked to “purpose”. Here’s an image of the map I made. I also add, after each final key concept (like “democracy”) the author’s name and year in capital letters. That way, when I want to read the article about democracy as the purpose for media literacy, I just look up the author’s name in my handy-dandy EndNote bibliography.

You can see I’ve used a computer to make my map, but I’ve also done them by hand, which Buzan advocates. I used MindManager, which isn’t free. FreeMind, an open-source application that was developed after I bought MindManager also gets great reviews. And it is free. Which is good.

You may want to highlight certain articles. I highlighted the most recent ones, because the review was meant to be a review of recent literature. Another good possibility is highlighting those cited above a certain number of times. If you ticked the “Times Cited” box on your ISI export, this is something you can find out. You can also search ISI to check the citation figures on the books you found in WorldCat, if you’re compulsive. Knock yourself out.

Step Five: Read your articles
You knew it would come to this. This is where the rest of your academic training comes to your aid, and you can put this nasty article away.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 8th, 2004 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Academic, Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.