LEARNA: Systematic Literature Searching

Before you start looking for and reading journal articles it is important that you have first done some background reading and have a basic understanding of the topic.  Without background reading you may struggle to identify keywords, to read journal articles, and to write your introduction.  Journal articles are much more focused and narrower in their topics than books and aren't usually as easy to read.

If your topic is very broad, then you may find your search results overwhelming.  If you have already done some background reading and have an idea of what you are going to be writing, it can sometimes be easier to divide your searches up into manageable chunks.

Inclusion criteria define the characteristics that make a study eligible for inclusion. These criteria specify the population, intervention, comparison, and outcomes of interest.

Exclusion criteria identify characteristics that lead to the exclusion of studies from the review

These should be clearly defined before you begin your systematic searches.

Grey literature is materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. This includes things like theses, reports, working papers, government publications, registers of control trials and white papers.  It can be challenging to discover, access, and evaluate, but it plays a crucial role in research, in particular when accessing emerging information before it is published via the traditional channels like books and journals.

Before you do your main, focused search for journal articles you might want to consider some broader keyword searching.  FINDit article search is perfect for this as it cross searches a wide range of resources across a range of subject areas.

This will allow you to see if there is a lot of research on your topic, or not very much and you may then want to adjust your assignment title accordingly.  It will also help you to see what keywords work and which don't and potentially pick up new ones.  It will also help you to see if your keywords are picking up a lot of irrelevant articles and see if you need to take steps to negotiate that.

FINDit and Google Scholar are good places for background reading as they search widely. 

Once you have done some preliminary searches you should be able to chose a topic and fit to a framework (if necessary).  For the best experience, you want to avoid very broad topics and things which have no evidence base.

Google Scholar is a very large source of information so it is recommended for use as a secondary search, to supplement the main searches in the healthcare databases.

Google Scholar searches more widely than the databases, so can be a good source of grey literature.

Tips for using Google Scholar are:

• Set up USW Library links.  To do this click on Settings then Library Links. Type University of South Wales into the search box and select FINDit@University of South Wales – Viewonline@USW.Tick the boxes next to the results and save. You will now be able to access our subscriptions via Google Scholar.
• Use the 'Advanced Search' for additional search options.
• Use the 'Cited by' link to find citations for articles that you have already identified.  This will allow you to keep your research up to date.
• Use the 'Saved Searches' feature to rerun your searches and check for new results at a later date.

NB: USW Library does not provide support with using these tools