Resources to help you with your literature review

Find out where to start with your literature review with help from the Library on locating resources, search techniques and more.

Locating resources

Getting started with the online library

Watch the Library's short introduction showing you how to get started with the online library. The webpage also provides an overview of ebooks, ejournals, articles and databases. To help you navigate the library website for the first time, go along to a live introductory training session, or view the slides and recording of a previous session.

Finding information on your research topic

The Finding information on your research topic page provides advice and guidance on a number of ways to search for what you need:

• You can find selected resources for your study by research topic, such as psychology, or earth sciences.
• See the guide to help you do a literature search, including which databases to search, keywords and phrases and search techniques.
• Find some tips on how to evaluate the information you find critically. The ability to critically evaluate information is an essential skill for postgraduate researchers. This skill is particularly pertinent to the production of literature reviews, where a critical appraisal or analysis of the literature is required. This page gives an overview of 'PROMPT', a structured approach to critical evaluation of information (Provenance, Relevance, Objectivity, Method, Presentation, Timeliness).
• Learn how to do a citation search. Citation searching, which is also known as cited reference searching, is useful if you already have a useful reference to a book or journal article on the subject you are researching. It allows you to search forward in the published literature, starting from your known reference, to locate new articles which cite your known reference in their bibliographies (the lists of references usually found at the end of chapters, or journal articles).
• Discover how you can use Google Scholar to access eresources the Library subscribes to.

Advanced search techniques

Advanced searching outlines some of the advanced search techniques that you will need to employ to conduct thorough searches using electronic search tools. The Research Support team also provide advanced literature searching information for you, in addtion to a three-part literature searching training series.

Managing and presenting your literature review

Referencing

The Library's referencing and plagiarism page gives advice on how to manage and present your references, referencing styles and covers bibliographic management tools. You may also want to refer to the plagiarism guidance pages designed specifically for Postgraduate Researchers.

Copyright

If you are planning to use copyrighted material within your thesis, you should consult the Research Support team's guidance on 'Copyright and your thesis' and the Research Skills guide to learn more about how copyright may affect your research and how to seek permission from copyright holders. In addition to this guidance, the Research Support team run a training session on 'Copyright: Using third-party content in your thesis'.