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CICS 237 Class Visit

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).  

Use the main concepts of your research question/topic to find the range of work that exists on the topic.

Discovery Search Box

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. 

ACM Article Example

Citation chaining can help identify seminal articles, but it can also be very narrow and esoteric. Not easily scalable!