University Library September 2014

Literature Search Record

www.le.ac.uk/library

Search Summary

A record of where, when and how you searched will help you when writing up your research, as you won’t remember later where you looked and the keywords you used.

Research topic:

Key concepts:

Database Searched

Date Searched

Search Strategy Used (Keywords, phrases, subject terms)

Limits (Date range, language)

No. Results

Notes Search strategy saved (name)? Files saved/exported (name/place)? Keywords, authors for future searches?

2 UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER · LIBRARY

www.le.ac.uk/library

Database Searched

Date Searched

Search Strategy Used (Keywords, phrases, subject terms)

Limits (Date range, language)

No. Results

Notes Search strategy saved (name)? Files saved/exported (name/place)? Keywords, authors for future searches?

3 UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER · LIBRARY

www.le.ac.uk/library

You may need to justify the decisions you make e.g.

Reasons for choosing the date range – has there been a change in research practice / introduction of new technology or ideas?

If you decide to limit to English Language give reasons / acknowledge implications of publication bias. Remember to re-run your searches regularly to find new publications, or set-up search alerts/RSS feeds to keep up to date. You don’t have to just search for key words or concepts. Other searches can be useful e.g.

Author search

Citation search

Grey Literature (‘unpublished’ or non-academic publications) Literature searching is an iterative process you may need to add /or remove keywords to improve your search strategy Further Help http://www2.le.ac.uk/library/for/researchers/training-and-development/finding-information

4 UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER · LIBRARY

www.le.ac.uk/library