Are you looking for clever ways to find literature reviews? AI tools have yet to come up with relevant solutions, but Scopus might do the job.
Right now, there is a sprawling undergrowth of AI tools purporting to support the search for literature – some of them are more reliable than others. One feature that remains to be seen in any of these new products is the option to sort papers by according to type as reviews.
The classic bibliographic database Scopus offers a couple of opportunities:
Sort your keyword search by document type:
To access this mechanism, set up your keyword search, find the sorting option “Document type” in the left-side hand menu, and select “Review”. This yields lots of seemingly useful results. However, publishers' use of the “Review” tag is not consistent with just literature reviews. A search on “dark tourism” sorted by review in the document type section will also display this paper: “Review of ‘Dark tourism and pilgrimage’,” which is, of course, not a literature review, but rather a review of a book.
Set up your own keyword search:
For the connoisseurs, we have developed the below keyword search string that will yield literature reviews, including meta-analyses.
This option has other weaknesses though – to narrow down the pool of results, I have used the index “Article title” which may exclude relevant results.
To make use of this search, go to Scopus and input the search string combined with your own research interest in the first line:
(TITLE-ABS-KEY ("dark tourism") AND TITLE (literature OR research) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (review OR analys*))
If you use “Advanced search” in Scopus, just input the search string and replace “Dark tourism” with a topic that is relevant to you.
Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have questions.