Skip to Main Content

Online Education: Literature Review Support

Writing the Literature Review (Part One): Step-by-Step Tutorial for Graduate Students [Produced by University of Maryland University College]

Writing the Literature Review (Part Two): Step-by-Step Tutorial for Graduate Students [Produced by University of Maryland University College]

Conducting a Literature Review: Good Place to Start- Citation Databases

Interdisciplinary Citation Databases:  

A good place to start your research is to search a research citation database to view the scope of literature available on your topic.

TIP #1: SEED ARTICLE
Begin your research with a "seed article" - an article that strongly supports your research topic.  Then use a citation database to follow the studies published by finding articles which have cited that article, either because they support it or because they disagree with it.

TIP #2: SNOWBALLING
Snowballing is the process where researchers will begin with a select number of articles they have identified relevant/strongly supports their topic and then search each articles' references reviewing the studies cited to determine if they are relevant to your research.

BONUS POINTS: This process also helps identify key highly cited authors within a topic to help establish the "experts" in the field.

Literature Review (Video)

Literature Reviews: An Overview for Graduate Students by North Carolina State University Libraries

Finding the Evidence - A PICO Tutorial

This video from the CEBM demonstrates how to use PICO to formulate a clinical question.

PubMed Advanced Search Builder

Use MeSH to Build a Better PubMed Query

PubMed: The Filters Sidebar