Getting an overview of an unfamiliar research field is challenging. Literature reviews can help. Either find the ones that have already been written, or research and write one of your own. The latter is of course the hardest and most time consuming, but also gives your deeper knowledge, as you yourself do the gathering, reading, summarising, synthezising.
The tools for both finding and carrying out literature reviews are available through the library.
Searching for literature reviews
Several databases let you search for literature reviews – The Social Science Citation Index (Web of Science) and Scopus are the most obvious. The search would look similar in the two databases; your primary search should be for the subject and subsequent additions to the search should catch the “Literature review”s, the “analysis of the research”, the “bibliometric analysis”. This can be done by adding first [literature OR research] in the title field and then [review* OR analys* OR synthe* OR bibliomet*] in the topic field. (For more information on using Boolean operators, look below in this newsletter.) See the illustration:
This search has its pitfalls, though. You cannot always assume that the title of the article is descriptive; on the other hand, if you do not limit the [literature OR research]-part of the search to the title field, the results becomes far too fuzzy. So depending on your initial subject, you should work on additional strategies. Don´t hesitate to contact your liaison librarian about this.
Your own literature reviews
Conducting your own literature review, either as preparation for writing an article on a subject, or as a stand-alone work, the software NVivo provides a nice workspace. It will help you manage the workflow of gathering, coding and classifying your found articles.
This is NVivos own tutorial on the subject. You´ll find a similar one taylored for Mac users. Again, do not hesitate to contact your liaison librarian for assistance.