Improve Your Literature Search and Screening

Literature searches and screening are the starting point of all literature reviews. The success of the literature search step is determined by how you search for and select research papers to start.

The basics of the search step are to:

1. 1Choose a publisher database, search engine, or literature search tool.
2. 2Find articles that are related to your research question.
3. 3Find similar articles to those you've found, and add relevant papers to your review.

The third step is where people tend to get tripped up. How do we find similar papers? How do we quickly know if they are relevant to what we're searching? The answer to these questions is screening.

The screening process is to determine relevance; filter papers to include/exclude; and ensure that you're not missing a key detail that will close a research gap, disprove your hypothesis, or worse... an exact paper addressing what you wanted to write.

You can improve the screening portion of your literature review by creating an annotated bibliography, by taking copious notes, or by using a literature screening software like FoundThat. At any rate, you can most efficiently screen articles in this order:

1. 1Read for key quotes in the abstracts of all papers you find in a search.
2. 2If relevant, search for keywords in the full text to find common methods, results, etc.
3. 3Take note of which keywords were used, which papers contained them, and sections from the paper to quickly reference later.

Our free guide explains in detail the literature review workflow. You'll find detailed information on the steps in writing a literature review, what goes wrong, and how to fix it.