How to do a literature review in a smart way

Every researcher knows exactly how important a literature review is because it gives you a good look at the current picture of how far science has advanced. One painstaking review could cost you months or days, to say the least. So, one most frequently asked question of how to conduct such work in a seamless and tireless way persists. This note offers a relatively smart way to conduct such a literature review. However, expecting to just do nothing to get to where you want to be is not how it works in the scientific world.

Keeps in mind

A quickest way to get things done is to borrow cumulative strength from others or simply known as standing on the shoulders of a giants.

If the problem you are probing is relatively conventional, the scientific community might have it all wrapped up for you already. What does this mean?

Well, it means that there are researches that must have already conducted great reviews on the subject matter to offer a good grip to others in the same field. This is also true for not just social science but natural science from the stance of the writer. But how to find those incumbent reviews?

Because of the ubiquity of Google scholar, fairly speaking, this article focuses on exploiting this tool as a means to get the job done.

First, do your homework to collect the most frequently used keywords of the topic you want to search. Remember, the more precise your choices are, the faster and accurate the results come out. Then, simply add the search phrases “systematic review” and/or “meta-analysis” in front or back of your search keywords (sequence or order does not matter much)

For example, I want to know about the current status of consumers' behaviors toward organic foods. The search phrases could be: organic food + systematic review or meta-analysis

Note: try to limit the search horizon to find the latest papers only (preferably the older year suggested by Google, which in this case 2017) and…voilà

Look! There are several candidates for the job. From them, you can acquire a decent understanding of where the scientific crowd is heading and their current path, and most importantly what still needs to be done. These suggestions really help.

Second and last, to complete your literature review with the newest and most relevant studies, the snowball method comes in handy.

From the finished search results, try to notice which latest reviews have the most cites and work your way down.

For instance, the work of Kuswah et al. (2019) caught my attention. Thus I decided to depart from there by clicking on the “cited by xx” to further expand the list of papers that cited this specific work.

Here comes the outcome page

What remains to be done is to dive into these knowledge pools and delve out what you need. Trust me, you will hardly miss the necessary information needed for your own research.

And, practice makes perfect. Let’s go ahead and validate my note and I would love to receive constructive comments below to improve this note.

Or if you want to swing by to say hello. Hollar at me at:

My Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Huy-Dang-9

My email: ddhuy@hcmuaf.edu.vn or simon.hdang@gmail.com

My Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/duchuynlu/

Good luck and peace out!