Conducting a Literature Search

The term literature search refers to the process of identifying and reading sources pertinent to your research with the intent of focusing your research and identifying the ideas, theories, and findings from these sources that could be used in your rationale, literature review, theoretical framework, and research methods. Conducting a literature search can be overwhelming. Graduate students often struggle to know where to start, how to find good sources, how far to branch out, how to process the information from the sources, and how to know when they've read enough.

To complete a literature search in a timely fashion, it is important to have a plan. Your literature search plan should not only have specific actions that you plan to take, but also specific deadlines for completing parts of the literature search. While it is not possible to anticipate all of the actions you will have to take to complete your literature search, nor to anticipate exact dates for completion, listing specific actions and deadlines can help you keep your thesis moving toward a timely completion. To help make the literature search more manageable, I've chosen to break the process down into a series of stages. This helps make clear some of the different processes that you will be engaged in as you do your literature search. Note, however, that these stages are not disjoint. In fact, it is possible that throughout the entire literature search, you will be engaged in more than one stage at a time. Moreover, what you discover in a later stage may cause you to return and reengage in an earlier stage. Thus, you should think of the stages as a description of the different kinds of work you will do while engaged in your literature search rather than as a series of steps that you must follow.

Stage 1: Gathering and Organizing Initial Materials

In this first stage, your goal is to engage in a broad enough search that you are able to identify some of the seminal works, respected researchers, key issues and theories, and important findings pertaining to your topic. You can think of this stage as constructing a rough map of the research terrain surrounding your research topic. Unlike in later stages, you may spend more time in this stage constructing a bibliography than actually reading papers. In fact, you should carefully limit reading in this stage to seminal pieces only. All other sources should either be quickly scanned (if they look particularly promising) or set aside for later stages in your literature review. By the end of this stage, you should have a good idea of what papers you need to read based upon who wrote them, where they appear, and what issues or topics they address.

Some of the common methods for creating an initial layout of the research terrain and a bibliography of sources to read are as follows: 

• Ask experts: Ask people who know about your topic for seminal papers, important theories, crucial issues, and prominent researchers related to your research area. Your advisor can be particularly helpful in identifying the first few papers you should read.
• Search prominent journals: Peruse several years of the table of contents from prominent mathematics education journals for articles related to your research topic (e.g., Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Educational Studies in Mathematics, Journal of Mathematical Behavior, Thinking and Learning Mathematics, For the Learning of Mathematics, Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education).
• Search the reference sections of the papers you locate: Look through the bibliographies of the papers you have already identified for additional sources. Bibliographies are particularly valuable for identifying pertinent books and book chapters.
• Search using online databases: Use some of the online databases to help you locate additional sources (e.g., Google Docs, ERIC). Note that this is not typically the first method to be used in amassing sources, because you will often not know what key words to search under or how to separate important sources from less important ones until you have used some of the other methods above. Consequently, using a database too early in this stage can lead to a huge waste of your time. However, once you have a feel for the literature, a database can help you identify valuable sources that you may have overlooked using other methods.

As you identify sources, it is often helpful to collect electronic copies of the papers and chapters and enter them into Endnote. Many times when you locate a source, you do so through electronic means that gives you direct access to an electronic copy. Grabbing a copy of the material at that moment is often much easier than trying to relocate the source later. Endnote offers a place to store the electronic copies right in the records of the bibliographic information. Hardcopies can also be made when electronic copies are unavailable, and then scanned and entered into Endnote.

By the end of Stage 1, you should not only have a list of sources (and many of the sources themselves) related to your topic, but also a list of the seminal pieces, important people, and important theories and issues. 

Stage 2: Identifying and Narrowing Interests

The second stage consists of reading selectively from the sources that you amassed in Stage 1 so as to narrow your research focus and find a particular issue or question on which to focus your attention. As you read, you will want to attend to what is known and unknown about your topic, what theories and findings seem well-established and helpful, and what theories and findings seem questionable or worthy of a closer examination. You should start this stage by reading the sources that seem most interesting or important to you.

Reading at this stage in your literature search is much like the initial analysis you will do of your qualitative data. You are looking for broad themes and issues, as well as ideas, questions, or phenomena that pique your interest. Often times you will recognize important ideas in the literature by the emotions that you experience while reading about them. If a paper sparks a strong emotional response in you, it is worthy of a more careful reading, particularly in terms of what particular problem, idea, or issue it might suggest to you for further research. 

As you engage in the literature search at this stage, the documentation you produce will be different than in Stage 1. Instead of producing lists of sources, you will be summarizing articles and writing memos about how those articles influenced your thinking about your research topic. The article summaries could be stored in Endnote and/or a spreadsheet. The latter choice is particularly worthwhile if you will be summarizing particular aspects of all the papers you are reading, such as their research questions, the theoretical lens they are using to analyze their data, the types of data they are collecting, or their particular stance toward your topic. The purpose of the article summaries is to catalog the important content in the articles so as to reduce the amount of rereading you have to do when you draw upon these papers to write your proposal. The memos, memos, in contrast, allow you to reflect on how your research interests are changing as a result of your reading, and can act as a catalyst for developing research questions for your study. 

Your goal at this stage is not to try to develop an in depth understanding of the research landscape surrounding your research topic. Instead, you are trying to identify a particular area on that map that you can focus on in your own research. The end result of this stage will be an initial set of research questions.

Stage 3: Filling in the Conceptual Framework

Once you have identified your research questions, the goal of the literature search changes from exploration to construction. In particular, you are now reading to create a conceptual framework (by conceptual framework, I mean your rationale, literature review, and theoretical framework). Before beginning this stage, you should create a concept map, or return to a concept map you created earlier and rearrange it as needed. You may even want to try outlining chapters 1 and 2 of your proposal. Both of these activities will be helpful in identifying places in your theoretical framework for which you still lack sources or understanding. Once you've identified holes in your conceptual framework, you will most likely have to do another Stage 1, collecting sources on very specific topics and issues. You will once again sort and prioritize these sources, and then read with specific purposes, such as to learn how to define the phenomenon you are studying, to identify particular theories about the process you are studying, or to justify why your research question is worth answering.

Like Stage 2, you will create summaries for the sources you are reading. However, you will also create notes, either in your concept map, your chapter outlines, or in a memo about how the particular ideas from the paper can be used in your proposal. It may be that this stage happens concurrently with the writing of your proposal, and thus the notes will be incorporated directly into the text of your proposal. 

Some Important Ideas to Keep in Mind

A literature search is never truly "finished." There is always more to be read that pertains to your study. Your goal in doing a literature search is not to read everything related to your topic and incorporate it into your proposal. Instead, it is to create a description of what you are studying, how you will be thinking about it, and why your particular viewpoint and research questions are worth pursuing.

The process of doing a literature search is messy and typically does not occur in the strict order above. The above is a description of some of the processes you will engage in, and a possible ordering. However, when you do your own literature search, you will most likely bounce around in these stages, using a process here and there, to propel you towards formulating your research questions and constructing your conceptual framework.

A literature search is not an end goal in and of itself. The purpose of a literature search is to help you construct your research proposal. The literature search is not something that you complete first, after which you begin to write your proposal. Instead, it should take place along side the planning, outlining, and writing of your proposal.