Literature reviews require you to find a LOT of articles. The idea is that you try to find ALL the articles on your topic that meet your criteria. You need to keep track of your research to avoid wasting time. That means you need to do some planning.
Planning your search really comes down to two things:
To understand where to search, you should consider what information you need, as well as get a good grasp of what material each database searches. Ultimately, you will need to report where you have searched as a part of your description of your lit review in your paper or thesis.
Some core databases to consider:
| Database | What is searched | Notes |
| PubMed | Medical Literature, including many nursing journals | This is the standard database for health sciences literature reviews. It is expected that you will be aware of the articles you would get if you ran your search in PubMed. |
| Scopus | Medical literature, science literature, social science literature. Includes nursing journals. |
This databases searches all the PubMed articles, but includes additional literature not found in PubMed. |
| CINAHL | Some medical literature, many nursing journals | This databases specializes in nursing and allied health literature. Nursing material that is not in PubMed can often be found in CINAHL. |
It is invaluable to keep a list of the terms you have tried, and other possible terms that you find that might work better. For one thing, you need to report what terms you use in your lit review. For another, using good terms is a critical part of finding all the relevant articles.
There are three things you should keep in mind about search terms.
Subject terms are controlled vocabulary used to collect all articles on a given topic. Each database may have it's own subject terms. There are also Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that are valuable to include in your search.
Put the word "OR" between your search terms, and the database will search ALL the terms, and if it finds ANY one of them, it will include the article in your search results. This has dramatic effects on increasing the number of results.
Example: breast feeding OR lactation
Put the word "AND" between terms, and BOTH of the terms must be found in an article for it to be included in your search results.
Example: (breast feeding OR lactation) AND medication
The greatest search strategy you have is running a search in a core database using good terms, and improving your knowledge and critical evaluation skills by looking through the results and reading the abstracts. However, there are some tools in the databases that will be invaluable to your lit review.
In a good lit review, you will become aware of key authors--those who have published many studies and articles, and who are frequently cited by others. Scopus can greatly speed up the process of identifying these people.
Here is a short video to show you how to find key authors in a topic area in Scopus.
Every research article points to many, many more articles in their reference list. This is a tried and true method for quickly expanding your list of articles to review. Some databases also point to articles which have cited the ones which have cited those in your results list. This helps you identify more recent articles in your topic area.
Databases and search engines have filtering features, usually on the left side of the results, to help you narrow your search. You can filter by date range (i.e. last 5 years), articles written in English, type of study performed, etc.
Since a lit review is a process of gradually and thoughtfully putting together a lot of materials and saying something useful about them, keeping track of those materials is critical to success.
RefWorks is a citation management tool that allows you to save and organize the articles you find. You can also use it to create bibliographies.
Covidence is a tool that manages the systematic review process. Individuals can sign up for a free trial of up to 500 records (the Library doesn't provide an institutional subscription). The Nurse-Midwifery Program requires use of this tool.
