Any piece of research will involve a lot of
searching through literature,
particularly when you come to the stage
of doing a literature review. There's
going to be a lot of delving through
bibliographic databases in order to find
what research exists out there already.
I've been doing a lot of this lately as
I've gone back to do a bit more
literature review work and I've been
searching through again to see whether
there is any new research that has popped up
but, also, I think it's healthy, every so
often, to go back and do another search
through the literature because some
articles or papers or books which might
not have seemed relevant two months ago,
since I've been doing more reading, might
suddenly become absolutely vital to my
project. Today, I wanted to take a look at
some methods for using online databases
to do some really good literature searches.
Now, there's many really good
bibliographic databases out there. The
one I use for my initial searches is Google Scholar. Now, all of the various
search engines tend to be imperfect in
some way. There's some things they'll throw up
that others won't and there's some things
that they'll miss out. Google Scholar
reaches into a few different bibliographic
databases which is really, really
useful because it gives really good
overview. Also, it's got some extra
little functions which we'll talk about
a little bit later on. So, the first thing
that you can always do on Google Scholar
is just use it like Google usually. So, at
the moment, I've been doing a lot of
research on city differentiation so,
looking at what makes a city a
global city or a metropolitan city or
cosmopolitan city as opposed to a
regional city or a non cosmopolitan city
etc etc etc. So, if I want to look up
global cities I can very simply just
type in "global cities". But the
terminology in this field for "global
cities" can often vary. So, sometimes
they're called global cities but
sometimes they're equally also called
cosmopolitan cities, sometimes they're
also called metropolitan cities. So what I can
start to do is, I can put in some boolean
operators (so that's our "and" and "or"
words) and I can put in "Global Cities" or
"Cosmopolitan Cities" or "Metropolitan
Cities".
You can also use "and" but usually what
Google Scholar will do is to assume an
"and" if there's not a boolean there. But
it does mean i can simplify the
search by doing "global" or "cosmopolitan"
or "metropolitan cities". I can also
equally do and "cities" or "city". I could
also then do and "regional" or
"non-metropolitan" or "noncosmopolitan".
And that's going to
suddenly bring my search results down
and really refine it to some
differentiation articles. There are a
number of other boolean
operators you can use which can really
help to refine your search. Particularly
if you're in sciences and have to do a
systematic review where you have
to make sure you find everything on a
particular topic, they can be
particularly useful. But there's a couple
of other tools on Google Scholar which I
find incredibly useful. So, recently I've
been doing a lot of research around
regional cities and globalization but
what I'll quite often find is that lots
of these articles will and be quite old.
So, there's one here from 1999, another from 2000. And,
actually, this is a field which moves
very, very quickly. So, Google Scholar
gives us the ability to and refine our
search by date. So if I want something
really really recent, I can click and
"since 2017" and I'll suddenly get
articles which have only been published
this year. Now, one of the great things
about doing literature searches is that
often literature will lead to literature.
If you've watched my other video where I
talk about taking notes on literature,
you'll know that I keep a To Read
list as I'm reading any single a bit of
literature. Which essentially allows me
to follow the trail back to work that's
referenced in a piece that I'm reading.
The downside of that is if that trail
only leads backward. So it leads us from a
piece that's written in 2017, say, to a
piece that's written in 2010 and then a
piece of literature from 2010
might then go back even further. So, a
particularly useful tool in Google
Scholar, and one that I only discovered
particular recently,
is that, underneath each result, there
is a "cited by" button which essentially
allows you to see any work that has
cited that particular article. So, say I
read this article "globalization as
reterritorialization" and found it
really really useful, but then I want to
find work that is like that but is more
recent, then I can click "cited by"
and it will take me to all of the
articles that have cited that article or
book since. Now, sometimes a citation
might be quite loose and so an article
citing another article might actually be
quite off-topic. So another great
function is the fact that Google Scholar
allows us to search within those. So, if I
really liked this article here I can
then search for "regional cities" within
the articles that have
cited that previous article. And this is a
really really useful way of building really comprehensive literature lists for
different topics. I've recently done it
with both theatre and cities and theatre
and globalization and it really helped
me to have a really complete list of
everything that exists on those topics
so that I can have that to refer back to
and use within my literature review to
make sure that there's not any holes
in what I'm doing. Finally, sometimes the
links through from Google Scholar are a
little bit off or sometimes they won't
work so quite often I'll find that I
have to go over to my University search
engine and then search for particular
article within the library article
search there. But actually, what Google
Scholar is really useful for, is
it is really great at finding work and then
you might find that and you have to
actually go and find it to read
somewhere else. So, I tend to use Google
Scholar more as a bibliographic finding
tool, rather than for finding the links
to the articles themselves. And the great
thing, then, is that you can find the
article and then bring it in to Mendeley
or Zotaro or whatever the citation
software is you use. So, that's a few
tips on doing a literature search for a
thesis or dissertation or essay that
you're working on. Do let me know if
your system is different, if you've
got any tips there are, as I say, some
other boolean operators you can use,
there are other bibliographic databases
available which you may find are
better and particularly for different
subjects there will be bibliographic
databases that are better for particular
fields. If you've enjoyed this then
please do give it a thumbs up or
subscribe and I will be back on Tuesday
with another video. Thanks very much!
