Researching for your literature review: Getting started

If you are having difficulty finding a suitable topic for your review, try thinking about the following:

• Areas of uncertainty
• Variations of practice 
• Assumptions in practice
• Existing review topics that may be outdated and could be revised to address a new element

Once you have your topic, put it into the format of a question or questions to be answered by the literature. 

Essentially a research question puts forward an hypothesis about a relationship, such as the relationship between an intervention and an outcome. For example: In P (population group) does I (intervention) result in O (outcome)? or Will I perform better than C at achieving O in population P?

The research question will guide the development of your search strategy so it's important that you take time to investigate the suitability of your proposed question.

The Library has a guide and video to guide you through the development of a good research question.

Generative AI tools can assist with both identifying a research area and developing your research question. Try Scopus AI (via Scopus database) to look at the emerging themes - potential hypotheses for your topic. This video by an academic language advisor in the Faculty of Education explains how you can use generative AI to develop a research question. 

This guide will provide a sample search for a health/medical research question, as well as for an education/social science research question. Choose which section you would like to work through.

Scoping searches are an essential step to:

• Ensure that your question addresses a gap in the literature, i.e. it has not already been answered. 
• Determine the quantity of existing literature i.e. whether your question is specific and focused enough to be feasible. Discover the main terminology used in the discussion of a topic, to  develop a comprehensive search strategy. 

This preliminary searching is non-systematic in its nature and is not documented.

Begin with a series of very targeted searches. These can include:

• Searching for your main keywords in the article title. 
• Searching for  review articles on similar topics to gain an overview of a facet of your own topic.

Sources for scoping searches include:

•  Google Scholar 
• Large inter-disciplinary databases such as Scopus or Proquest central
• Discipline-specific databases that you are familiar with. 

Scopus AI (in Scopus select the Scopus AI tab) and other generative AI research tools and mapping tools.

Your scoping searches should enable you to locate a 'gold set' of relevant articles that you would expect to include in your review. (This may also be called a 'sample set' or a 'sentinel set' of key papers).

This gold set is a curated collection of highly relevant papers for your research question.These articles are important as a reliable foundation for compiling your search terms.

The gold set is also needed to test the strength of the search strategy that you will later develop. This testing is a hallmark of a rigorous and comprehensive search. Unless you test your search on a target set of papers that are definitely relevant, you have no tangible means of assessing whether you have any errors or omissions in your search strategy!

Your gold set should be located during the preliminary 'scoping searches' discussed above. How you locate it is unimportant, but don't skip this step as it is crucial.