5.3. How Do I Find Relevant Sources?

Finding relevant sources for your literature review usually follows these steps:

1. Finding the right database
2. Building search queries
3. Skimming articles
4. Examining references

One of the joys of being a researcher in the twenty-first century is that we can do much of our work without ever leaving the comfort of our recliners. This is certainly true of familiarizing yourself with the literature. Most libraries offer incredible online search options and access to important databases of journal articles and other academic sources. (A quick note: for simplicity, we may refer to “papers” and “articles” further down when we mean academic sources in general.)

Rather than just diving into keyword searches on your topic, however, we would recommend that you start off by doing two things. First, install a citations management software package on your computer or mobile device. Zotero is free and open-source software that will help you organize the references for your sources. (Mendeley or RefWorks are similar, though unlike Zotero, they are not open-source and charge money to use certain features.) Zotero can be downloaded as an app for both desktop computers and mobile devices at zotero.org. Once you have installed Zotero’s free browser extension or tablet and phone app, you can easily obtain the necessary citation information for most sources by going to the webpage for that particular source (a journal article page or a library catalog entry, for instance) and using Zotero to automatically pull details like the article title, journal name, and publication date, which Zotero scrapes from the webpage’s metadata. You can also automatically generate in-text citations and reference lists in Microsoft Word and Google Docs for the sources you add to Zotero. Finally, you can store, read, and annotate the PDF files for your sources right in the Zotero app, which offers a free basic plan for cloud storage of these files.

Our second recommendation is to start your search for sources by looking for review articles and meta-analyses on your topic. As we described above, review articles provide a summary of the existing literature on a topic. If you find one on your topic, you will be able to read one person’s summary of the literature and go deeper by reading their references. Similarly, meta-analyses have long reference lists that are useful for finding additional sources on a topic. They can give you a precise sense of the scientific consensus about a particular phenomenon across however many studies were included in the meta-analysis. Please remember that both review articles and meta-analyses amount to their authors’ interpretations and assessments of the findings within a particular field, and there may be intense disagreements among scholars about the conclusions they draw. Nevertheless, review articles and meta-analyses are good places to start your literature search.

It goes without saying that you should not plagiarize the summaries of the literature in a review article (or any article’s literature review, for that matter) when writing up your own literature review. (See our extended discussion of plagiarism, including mosaic plagiarism, in Appendix A: Presenting, Writing, and Publishing.) Instead, figure out which area of the literature you want to focus on, and track down the studies mentioned there. Describe these studies in your own words, and use the review articles to help you put them in some sort of context regarding their importance within the field.

Hopefully you will find one or more overarching sources to guide your literature search. Oftentimes, though, a topic won’t have a decent review article or meta-analysis to rely on—the papers you find will be rather dated, or they may discuss the topic you want to study in an overly broad or overly narrow way, or they may cover a different field than sociology (which may not be so helpful to you, since you will want your literature review to be rooted in specific scholarly conversations that often fall along disciplinary lines). Don’t fret. At some point you’re going to need to move on to a general literature search, anyways. Research should always build on the most recent published studies on a particular topic, so you can’t just rely on review articles or meta-analyses to ensure that you’ve done your due diligence. Furthermore, the scholars who summarized the past literature may have missed important work that relates to your specific research question.

Step 1: Finding the Right Database

Some major databases you can use for finding academic sources relevant to sociology are:

• Google Scholar: This specialized search engine covers the academic literature across disciplines and gives you many options in searching for journal articles, monographs, and other scholarly sources. Google Scholar is a “natural language” search engine, which means it tries to use its knowledge of how people talk to better understand what you are looking for.
• Sociological Abstracts: This index provides a list (including abstracts) of the international literature from sociology and related disciplines. Sociological Abstracts is linked to Social Services Abstracts, which covers research in social work and human services.
• SocINDEX: This database offers the full text of peer-reviewed sociology journals covering research areas like gender studies, criminal justice, social psychology, racial studies, religion, social work.
• Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA): This index contains abstracts of international journals covering health, social services, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, race relations, and education.
• Social Sciences Citation Index: Part of the larger Web of Science database, this index includes articles from more than hundreds of journals across 50 social-science disciplines.

As we’ve discussed before, you want your own research to be connected to existing scholarly conversations within a field or subfield. To that end, you may want to pursue a more focused search for sociology papers and books, using the databases we mentioned that are devoted to sociological sources. However, because Google Scholar is free, requires no library subscription, and is widely used, we’ll mainly talk about how to find sources using this search engine, with the idea that some of these strategies can also be applied to other databases.

Note that Google Scholar by default displays not only peer-reviewed journal articles and books, but also non-refereed articles and books—possibly with government and think tank reports and other gray literature as well, depending on whether academic publications cite them. Given the wide range of sources included in Google Scholar, you will need to take extra care in vetting the quality of the sources you find (we’ll have more to say about that below), as well as ensuring they are focused enough on sociology or whatever subfield your research is contributing to. Those caveats aside, however, you should be able to use Google Scholar to find more than enough relevant sociology sources to start your literature review. Furthermore, we would advise you in general not to rely exclusively on searches of databases to find sources for your literature review. They are great places to start, but you will want to move away from them eventually and start identifying any new sources from scientific debates on your topic that are threaded across the papers you’re reading—specifically, by following the web of studies that cite each other. That way, you are connecting your work to an ongoing conversation within the literature.

Note that Google Scholar can be linked via the Library Links option (on Google Scholar’s Settings page) to your university library login, allowing you to access journal articles with one click on the Google Scholar page. Google Scholar also allows you to save articles in folders and provides a (somewhat correct) American Psychological Association citation for each article.

Step 2: Building Search Queries

Probably the most frustrating part about literature searching is that you will often get hundreds or thousands of articles for the searches you do. How can anyone be expected to read all these articles? First of all, you don’t need to look at all the sources you find. In fact, all you really need is a few relevant articles to get you started, and then, as we discussed, you will want to follow the breadcrumb trail of citations between articles in order to familiarize yourself with the important scholarly conversations on your topic.

That said, when you are searching for sources using a database or search engine, you can make your life easier by choosing your search queries—the search terms you use—with care. A precise search query can narrow down your results to a much smaller number of articles, all of which are specifically focused on your topic area. Since Google Scholar is a natural-language search engine, it gives you the flexibility to ask questions or type sentences or phrases in your search query. However, most other databases will not return useful results unless you use keywords—terms relevant to your topic area. For instance, in Google Scholar you could type the effects of cocaine addiction on the quality of parenting and find relevant articles, but in a database you would probably want to type something like cocaine addiction parenting child development. (See the sidebar Search Operators for more tips about how to combine keywords using search operators like AND, OR, and NOT.) It might be even better to put the phrases “cocaine addiction” and “child development” in quotation marks, which will return only sources with those exact phrases somewhere in their text, further narrowing your search.

Including jargon used by social scientists who study this topic may also help focus your search queries and filter out off-topic articles. For example, if you wanted to learn more about people from low-income households who do not have access to a bank account, you might use the keyword “unbanked,” a term that researchers use to refer to people without bank accounts. To find papers that talk about children who take on parental roles in families, you might include the term “parentification” in your search query. Of course, as a novice researcher, you can’t be expected to know these terms ahead of time. Instead, start with the keywords you already know. Once you read more about your topic, start including new keywords that will return the most relevant search results for you.

Here are some other tips for making your searches more effective:

1. Search for your keywords in specific fields. Many of the irrelevant results in your searches will probably be from articles that aren’t on your topic but just mention your search term in passing. Fortunately, most databases allow you to search for keywords in specific fields, such as the abstract of a journal article or book chapter. If your topic isn’t in the abstract, chances are the article isn’t relevant. You can be even more restrictive and search for your keywords in the title field. If the database has a “subject” field or something similar, put your keywords in it to get results from authors who have tagged their articles as addressing that topic.
2. Narrow down the time frame of your search. Articles older than several years won’t tell you the current state of knowledge on a topic. When starting your search, it is a good idea to focus on finding recent papers. Their literature reviews will hopefully cover the latest studies on your topic in addition to discussing the seminal articles and books in your subfield. Most databases have options to narrow your results down by date. In Google Scholar’s search results page, you have the option to further narrow your search to the last few years. As shown in Figure 5.1, use the links on the left when using a desktop browser. From Google Scholar’s hamburger menu in the upper-left corner, you can also choose the Advanced Search option to narrow your search to specific dates.
3. Search particular journals. You’ll notice that many of the articles you find in your literature searches are from the same journals. As we mentioned earlier, some journals are specialist journals that focus on particular research areas. Targeting those journals in your searches will not only help filter out irrelevant articles but will also ensure that you are engaging with the same scholarly conversation on your topic. For example, if you are searching for sociological articles related to employment and workplaces, you might want to search within the journal Work and Occupations and the edited volume series Research in the Sociology of Work for some good leads. If you are looking for the latest studies on cohabitation (couples who live together but are not married), you might want to search just the Journal of Marriage and Family. In the latter case, you could use Google Scholar’s Advanced Search option and enter “journal of marriage and family” (note the quotation marks to search for an exact phrasing) in the field “Return articles published in.” You could also just use the source: tag before that phrase in the search bar: source:”journal of marriage and family”. (To find a source from a particular website, use the site: tag instead: e.g., site:nber.org.)
4. Search for particular authors. As you scroll through the list of articles in your search results, you should begin to notice that certain authors keep appearing. If you find an author that has written multiple articles on your topic, consider searching the author field for that particular author (in Google Scholar, use the author: tag followed by the author’s name). You can also search the web for that author’s curriculum vitae, which will list their publications. Many academics maintain personal websites or put their CV on their university department’s website. Just type in their name and “CV” into a search engine.
5. Talk to a librarian. They are professional knowledge-gatherers, and if you are at a university or college, there is often a librarian assigned to your department or school. They routinely help students and faculty find the right sources for literature reviews.

Figure 5.1. Google Scholar

Earlier, we pointed out that it is a good idea to start your literature search by consulting a review article. Review articles are regularly published in journals like the Annual Review of Sociology and Sociology Compass, so you can search those journals in Google Scholar (e.g., source:”annual review of sociology”) or other databases to find one on your topic. On its results page, Google Scholar also has an option to narrow your search just to “Review articles” (see the link on the left-hand side of the screen in Figure 5.1). And if that option isn’t available in the database you’re using, you can include keywords in your query like “review article,” “review of the literature,” “state of the art,” and “research agenda” to cover the same ground.

Likewise, you can use “systematic review,” “meta-analysis,” or “meta-synthesis” in your search queries to find those types of articles. We should also note that the Campbell Collaboration and Cochrane—two international research networks—produce systematic reviews on a variety of topics. Cochrane synthesizes medical studies to help physicians make evidence-based decisions in health care; the Campbell Collabration publishes an open-access journal, Campbell Systematic Reviews, which evaluates social interventions in a variety of research areas: business and management, climate solutions, crime and justice, disability, education, international development, knowledge translation and implementation, methods, and social welfare.

Search Operators

Many databases (including Google Scholar) allow you to use Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT to connect words or phrases in your search query. This will easily narrow or broaden your search. An AND connecting two terms means both terms must be present, reducing the number of results you will get from your search query. For example, searching for cocaine AND parenting would return only those articles that mention both cocaine and parenting. (In some search engines, just listing both terms in your query—cocaine parenting—does the same thing as including AND.)

The NOT operator also reduces the number of results you get from your query. For example, perhaps you wanted to exclude issues related to pregnancy. Searching for cocaine AND parenting NOT pregnancy would exclude articles that mentioned pregnancy from your results. For the same effect, you can use a hyphen (-) right in front of the term you wish to exclude: cocaine parenting -pregnancy.

Using the OR operator can cover multiple phrasings, increasing the number of results you get from your query. This is helpful because researchers may use different words to mean the same thing—for example, using the terms “substance abuse” and “addiction.” In this case, searching for ”substance abuse” OR addiction would return all articles that mention one or the other search terms—in addition to those that mention both.

Step 3: Skimming Articles

Once you’ve found one or more articles that seem to be relevant to your topic, you need to see how they might fit in your literature review. Rather than read every article, read their abstracts and see which ones you really need to read. Abstracts appear in most reports of scholarly research and provide you with an easily digestible review of a study’s major findings and the theoretical framework the author is using to position their findings. They typically contain just a few hundred words, so reading them will quickly familiarize you with a study.

A well-written abstract will give you both a framework for understanding the rest of the article and its punchline—what the author found and whether the article is relevant to your area of inquiry. For this reason, we suggest skimming abstracts as part of the literature search process. Use the keywords you find in them (sometimes also listed separately below the abstract) to continue your search for more relevant studies. If the study seems relevant to your paper, it’s probably worth reading more. If it’s not, then you have only spent a minute or so reading the abstract. Another way to get a quick snapshot of the article is to scan the headings, tables, and figures throughout the report.

If you conclude an article is relevant, make sure to download the PDF or another version of the full text to your computer so you can read it later. You can keep the PDFs in folders on a cloud storage drive, arranged by topic. Better yet, you can use a reference manager like Zotero, which can help keep your sources and notes organized both on the cloud and on your computer. Many of these programs allow you to mark up those stored files with highlighting and comments. Regardless of how you organize and annotate your sources, you do want to take notes and think about how each source might be of use in your study, as we describe in detail later.

Step 4: Examining References

As you begin to read your articles or books, you’ll notice that the authors cite additional sources that are likely relevant to your topic area. You should definitely select sources for your literature review by looking through these reference lists. Follow the trail of citations from one source to another. See which papers are consistently cited across the sources you’re reading—those are key studies that probably belong in your literature review, too.

This process of searching through reference lists is called archival searching. Unfortunately, this process will only allow you to see relevant articles from before the publication date. For instance, the reference section of an article from 2020 will only have references from pre-2020. Some databases, however, allow you to do a forward-looking archival search, too. For instance, look up an article on Google Scholar and click the “Cited by” link at the bottom of its listing (refer to Figure 5.1). This is a list of all the articles that cite the article you just read. Google Scholar even allows you to search within the “Cited by” articles to narrow down your search further to articles that are more recent or relevant to your topic area. One good strategy is to find the most seminal articles (the most highly cited ones) on your topic through your archival searching, and then see which newly published articles cite them. That way, you are capturing both the foundational research on your research question and the state-of-the-art studies on it. (For more on archival searching, check out this tutorial.)