Your literature review should be comprehensive in scope – you want to give your readers an understanding of the evolution of your topic as well as an overview of the current scholarly literature as it relates to your topic. Your literature review will be broader in scope than your actual research question – this will help you understand the issues contributing/surrounding your (more focused) research question.
Example
Let’s say you’ve decided upon the following research question:
How has the US Intelligence Community used succession planning strategies to cultivate leaders from within and which strategies are most effective?
Before you start searching for information on your topic, you want to think about the concepts and ideas that are contained within your research question as well as those that are broadly related. Your literature review needs to demonstrate an understanding of all facets of your topic.
Someone researching our example might want to examine the following topics in support of a literature review (this is not an exhaustive list):
In addition to identifying the major facets broadly related to your research topic, you need to look closely at your research question and brainstorm keywords to search in the library.
In addition to identifying the major facets broadly related to your research topic, you need to look closely at your research question and brainstorm keywords to search in the library.
If we look at our example question, How has the US Intelligence Community used succession planning strategies to cultivate leaders from within and which strategies are most effective? , we can break it down into potential keywords that we might use to search the library databases. Remember – the library databases don’t work well when you type questions or long strings of words into them as you might do with Google. We need to search for only the most critical terms of our research question.
| US | Intelligence Community | succession planning | leaders | effective |
| United States | US IC | leadership development | managers | rate of advancement |
| US Federal Government | intelligence agencies | succession leadership | directors | career success |
| America | national intelligence | talent management | administrators | promotions |
The table above shows you just some of the synonyms that might be helpful to search in the library’s databases as keywords. It is important to remember that one person might write about a topic using one term (like “Intelligence Community” but another author might write about the same topic using “intelligence departments and agencies” To be thorough, you need to be exhaustive with your searches and synonyms. After an initial search you might become confident that the literature is using one term over another – but start out by being thorough.
Searching by subject differs from a keyword search. Keyword searches all parts of the article record as well as the full text of the article. Subject searches are limited to searching only the subject field for terms or phrases. Those terms and phrases are chosen from a controlled list of vocabulary databases create. To locate a subject term use the database thesaurus or check to see what terms are assigned to articles that match your topic.
Once you have thought about keywords, synonyms and subjects, it’s time to start searching in the library.
Explore a range of research, including the most current research associated with the problem statement or research question. When researching, summarizing, evaluating, and synthesizing materials, select research that demonstrates a range of approaches, publication dates, theories, and information in the field. Use the most relevant, significant, and appropriate information in relation to the thesis, its purpose, and objectives.
When choosing the research to include in the literature review, remember that the purpose of the literature review involves illustrating how this dissertation research fits into and fills a gap in the body of knowledge that makes up the larger field of strategic security.
Consult with the virtual librarian and the committee chair, SME, and committee member to confirm that the chosen research is both comprehensive and relevant to the problem statement and research question.
Boolean Operators are used when you have more than one search term that you want to link together as separate ideas, words or concepts. Each term in a Boolean search is searched separately, and terms are linked together according the operator’s function, which is demonstrated in the following examples.
Cat AND Dog finds all the items that have the terms Cat and Dog in them.
Cat OR Dog finds all the items that have the term Cat and all the items that have the term Dog.
Cat NOT Dog finds all the items that have the term Cat, minus all the items that have the term Dog.
Truncation can also allow you to search databases in an efficient way. If we did a search for:
We would get results for climate change, climate changes, climate changing.
You can also use quotation marks in your search to keep words together when you perform a search. For instance, if you want to find articles that contain the EXACT phrase ‘rain forest’, you would search for:
In this example, we are asking the database to search for several things:
One of the strategies is to locate other literature reviews on your topics. Searching databases for previous reviews provide direction on your research as you often are directed to seminal documents, theories, and authors. Some databases allow you to search by document type while others may require you to enter your topic search term(s). You should learn about the database you are searching for and how you can narrow the search parameters to the "Literature Reviews" related to your topics. When in doubt ask a librarian for help in finding Literature Reviews in the University's Databases.