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Lesson 7
Finding Related Literature
- Use Google Scholar, ERIC, or Penn State’s e-journal list for different purposes. Check out the "Library Resources" tab here in Canvas.
- Keep track of your key words and try different combinations to get you more results. Once you find an article that fits well, check for any key words they've included in their piece to come up with additional search terms.
- Use the related articles you are finding to snowball; in other words, use their bibliographies to find other interesting leads. When using Google Scholar, you might also check out the "Cited by" feature. Under each entry is a link to other published literature that have cited that particular study, which may lead you to newer and related studies.
- For this class, try to rely primarily on empirical research studies (rather than reviews of theory or someone’s opinion) for the literature review section of your proposal. A quick check for this is to look for the author's description of their methods. If it's an emprical study, there should be an explanation of how they collected and analyzed data.
On the following page you will find screencasts by Penn State librarian, Ellysa Stern-Cahoy that show you how to use the thesaurus tool in ERIC, Google Scholar, and the PSU libraries' E-Journal list.
Please watch the videos and then finish reading the remainder of the lesson.
NOTE: Some of you may find that you aren't finding literature that is exactly like what you want to do in your own inquiry project. This isn't bad news, and it doesn't mean you're doing something wrong! Often this means that you've stumbled upon an under-researched topic in the field or that you're approaching a problem in a new way. If this happens, consider what different areas of research might inform your work. For example, if you're considering the ways writing instruction might be informed by design thinking, you might need to look up current literature about classroom writing instruction more generally as well as studies of design-thinking in schools. Bringing those two fields together in your literature review will help frame your piece and show how you're bringing these two existing conversations together in fresh ways.