CICS 237 Class Visit
Rebecca Reznik-Zellen
Lederle Graduate Research Center, A273
Literature Searching Strategies
Keyword searching looks for your research concepts across the published literature. Keyword searching allows you to identify content that you do not already know exists and to discover as much as you can. The structure and features of the database you are using to search can make your results more relevant (truncation, fielded searches, filtering).
Keyword searching takes time! It can introduce a lot of irrelevant results if your search is too broach or vague. Iterate until you find a strategy that produces relevant results!
Citation chaining is a process for identifying new literature from an existing source. It allows you to use research papers to follow the conversation on a specific topic.
Start with an article that is relevant to your topic. Examine cited references (works cited, bibliography) of the original work to understand what it is building on -- backward chaining. Identify those articles that have cited the original article to see where the work is going -- forward chaining. Many databases provide the tools to do this, such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and the ACM Digital Library.
Citation chaining can help identify seminal articles, but it can also be very narrow and esoteric. Not easily scalable!
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