Part I: The Research Process
Heading Down the Rabbit Hole
Resources for Searching the Literature
It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to assist you in developing your literature searching skills or strategies. Never fear! There are a lot of resources available to help you. Your best resource is your university library. Librarians are trained to help students and faculty become competent users of the research tools available to them. They can also help you define a reasonable scope and strategy for conducting your literature search or writing a literature review.
In addition to the librarians in your university library, there are also online tutorials and guidelines for doing a literature search or writing a literature review. Here are a few useful resources.
Online Resources for Conducting a Literature Search
- eSKILLS UNE is a comprehensive step-by-step tutorial from the University of New England (Australia) on the process of finding and using information. A more advanced version of the tutorial designed for graduate students is also available.
- How to do Research in the Library is a guide from the University of California at Santa Cruz that covers basic research as well as tips for finding specialized resources, citing sources, and writing a literature review.
- Library Research: Finding Primary Sources is an extensive guide from the University of California at Berkeley that explains what primary sources are and how to search for them in the library and special collections.
- Literature Review is a guide from the Union Institute and University that explains the purpose of a literature review and offers tips and resources for conducting one.
- The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It from the University of Toronto, describes a literature review and lists questions to ask when searching the literature of your discipline.
- Research and Documentation Online by Diana Hacker, provides information on finding and documenting sources in the Humanities, Social Sciences, History, and the Sciences. It also includes tips for evaluating sources and a list of style manuals for different disciplines.
- The Road to Research: The Research Skills Tutorial is an excellent introduction to library and internet research from Wesleyan University. It covers the research process from identifying sources to finding and citing them.
- Using Primary Sources on the Web from the University of Washington Library, describes the range of primary resources, lists sites on the Web that offer or link to primary resources, and provides in-depth help on evaluating primary sources located on the Web.
- Writing a Literature Review is a guide from Wesleyan University that explains the differences between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. It also provides a useful diagram and overview of the scholarly publishing process.
