Before conducting a literature search for your paper, consider the following points to avoid spending excessive time on corrections and amendments later in the writing process.
- Planning Ahead
Even though the process of academic writing is not linear, it can be useful to set clear time slots for your literature research. This ensures that you have enough time left over for reading, evaluating, and writing, and that you don’t get lost in an overwhelming amount of sources.
Time management also includes examining the requirements for the paper (especially the scope of the work), required sources, as well as the deadline and milestones.
- Formal Requirements
- What particular kind of assessment is required? Should the thesis be purely a review or should it also include empirical work?
- What should be the scope of the paper?
- Required citation style (e.g. APA-7 at HSLU W). Further information on citing can be found here.
- Sources
- The minimum number and type of sources (e.g., scientific articles, books, journals)?
- Are there any geographical restrictions? For example, should your sources be limited to publications from Switzerland, Austria, and Germany?
- Are there requirements for the recency of the sources?
- Reliability and quality: Is peer-reviewed literature required exclusively?
- Dealing with Your Topic
The starting point for a search is to think about your own level of information: What do I already know? Where do I lack knowledge?
Compile the existing information:
- Limit your topic as good as possible, but don’t make it too narrow.
- On what basis of information did you define your topic? (Current newspaper articles, suggestions from your supervisor etc.)
- What do you already know about the topic?
In this phase, both internet searches and the use of encyclopedias (e.g. Wikipedia) are useful. See also: Search Tools
- Note Down and Arrange Search Terms in a Structured Way
When you first start dealing with your topic, you may notice how differently it can be approached or described. Different authors sometimes use different terms for the same aspect. A mind map can help you to note down and structure all the central terms of a topic or divide them into subtopics. A word table (in German) can also provide an overview: note down suitable general and subordinate terms for each aspect and add related and synonymous terms. This creates a set of words that allows you to carry out a search in a systematic way later on. The search terms in the set can be meaningfully linked using Boolean operators.
A thesaurus (in German) or dictionary (in German) can also be helpful for arranging a set of terms.
Further Information
The following videos provide a brief overview of the topic of „search preparation“:
- Search preparation summarized (in German): Recherchefahrplan für wissenschaftliches Arbeiten – YouTube
- Find & structure your search terms (in German): SLUBcast – Recherchevorbereitung – Suchbegriffe finden – YouTube