The literature search process can be challenging for researchers since they need to keep track of new developments, methods, and perspectives from large volumes of ever-growing literature. As a researcher, you may often feel overwhelmed with the amount of information you have to typically process, especially as you grapple with the anxiety of missing potentially relevant studies. In fact, one of the top questions researchers have is how to do a literature search effectively.
Conducting a scientific literature search is often a time-consuming and effort intensive process. Here are a few tips on how to plan and manage your literature search efficiently:
- Choose the most relevant keywords
Defining the keywords or key phrases for your scientific literature search is a crucial step since it will determine how broad, narrow, and relevant your search results will be. Make a list of multiple keywords specific to your area of interest. Use Boolean searches (e.g., with “and” and “or” operators) to refine your literature search process.
- Sign up for alerts
Signing up for different types of new-publication alerts can be a very useful way to keep up with new research publications in peer-reviewed journals. If you’re wondering how to do a literature search with alerts, here are the most commonly used alert types you can explore:
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- Table-of-contents alerts: As the name suggests, you get an email alert containing the table of contents of a new issue of a journal whenever it is published.
- Keyword alerts: You get an email whenever papers relevant to the keywords of your interest are added to databases like Scopus, Google Scholar, and Web of Science.
- Citation alerts: You can set up alerts to notify you when a specific author or a specific paper is cited.
- RSS feeds: RSS feeds for specific journals are useful in getting automatic, timely updates about new research published in those journals.
- Find systematic literature reviews
Another important strategy is to find systematic literature reviews in the areas specific to your research. These reviews synthesize knowledge derived from various research-related literature in a particular field over time and are a great way to discover relevant and recent research papers.
- Use social media, friends, and colleagues as sources of new information
Social media can be one of the quickest and best sources of information when it comes to keeping track of research-related literature and new developments. You can find, follow, and network with researchers who have research interests similar to yours on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Those who are active on social media often share and talk about their new publications and other research-related literature. You can also have academic discussions with colleagues and friends about new developments in your fields of interest. This is a great way to share information and perhaps gain fresh insights into a particular topic and enhance your literature search process. Similarly, journal clubs act as an important means of gaining new information and insights from peers in your discipline. In recent years, journal clubs have carved their space on various social media platforms.
- Schedule time to find and read literature
This might seem like old-school advice on how to do a literature search, but consistency is the key for an efficient literature-search strategy. Reviewing literature should ideally be a regular habit, so that processing the volumes of new literature causes minimal stress.
- Review gray literature
Gray literature consists of sources of information published outside the typical scholarly channels, such as policy reports, newsletters, and government documents. These can be important information sources for your scientific literature search since they may be more current than peer-reviewed journal literature and, sometimes, also the only source of information.
- Organize your research
Skim through papers efficiently before deciding to spend time reading them in their entirety. This will save you a tremendous amount of time spent on the literature search process. Use reference managers to organize your research by archiving any interesting paper you read along with a short summary of it. Have subject-specific tags/folders to save research papers in an organized manner.
Finding and reading literature regularly are two important skills for a researcher, and both of these tasks can be daunting. But there’s an easy-to-use tool that is free, saves time, and can be used on your mobiles. R Discovery—a mobile app offered by Researcher.Life—is an AI-powered tool that simplifies the literature search process through the use of advanced algorithms, which recommend relevant articles from all the fields of your interest.
R Discovery has a database covering more than 96 million research publications from over 32,000 peer-reviewed journals, and this repository is updated every week.
This app is a one-stop solution to simplify the literature search process and comes with the following features:
- It allows you to spend more time reading literature than looking for it. Based on your preferences, it provides you with the top three papers to read every day.
- You can optimize your reading by browsing through easy-to-follow summaries before deciding to read the full-length articles.
- It lets you bookmark and track your reading and has a wide (and expanding) repository of scholarly literature.
- In the coming months, R Discovery will have a “multiple feeds” feature to organize and track literature better and make reading simpler.
R Discovery solves the problems of how to do a literature search! With this app, you can access the latest research more easily, anywhere and anytime. The R Discovery app can be downloaded from Google Play Store for your Android device or from Apple App Store for your Apple device.
