Finding key literature on a topic can be challenging. It is essential to plan your literature search and identify keywords and concepts, relevant content platforms, and use appropriate search techniques.
MBZUAI Library provides graduate research level tools to identify peer-reviewed resources, this includes citation databases, indexes, bibliographies, and academic search engines. If you are using Google Scholar remember to enable the library link feature which will identify MBZUAI-licensed resources.
Before gathering resources, consider the following:
- Frame your research questions and compile an inventory that:
- Identifies key concepts and keywords.
- Identifies core scholars, researchers, and scientist in your area of research.
- Identifies services, products, and systems in your area of research.
- Build search strategies to interrogate different databases
- Improve the quality of search results by using appropriate techniques to search a database:
- Design search strings of keywords that can broaden or narrow your search depending on your topic.
- Use phrase search, citation search, Boolean logic, nested searches, proximity, truncation, and wildcard variations of subject terms.
- Refine your results to areas of interest by using available filters, and limit searches by publication year, source type, language, subject area, etc.,
- Save successful searches and create alerts to receive notification of the latest articles published in your area of interest.
- For more information, see the MBZUAI library resource guides: Using the library’s search engine and Database Features
- Choose platforms to perform your literature searches
- Identifying the appropriate platform to conduct your search may depend on where you are in your research journey:
- Use citation databases, indexes, bibliographies and academic search engines to identify core and peer-reviewed resources.
- For full text searches use the library's single search facility or navigate directly to a publisher's database if you know the publisher of the required source.
- Evaluate identified resources
- Prefer peer-reviewed resources.
- Use lateral reading to evaluate your resources.
- Document the process to ensure coverage and reduce repetition
- Use research management tools to manage your research references efficiently. These tools help you to swiftly gather, classify and store your sources, format citations and create bibliographies automatically in your preferred style.
- MBZUAI Library supports the use of EndNote online and Mendeley Reference Manager. The library also has a tool with citation management capability: Overleaf - a web-based authoring platform for LaTeX users.
- Acknowledge sources correctly
- Reference sources correctly and consistently using preferred referencing styles
- Learn more about MBZUAI referencing styles and information for two citation styles: IEEE referencing style and Chicago Manual of style- before you start writing your thesis or dissertation.
Conduct a literature search & gather sources
