Searching and managing your literature

Introduction

Key terms: literature search, reference management, reference management software (such as RefWorks),  introductory course, relevant for students in any phase  of their PhD trajectory.

ECTS: 1
Number of sessions: 1
Hours per session: 4

This course focuses on the practical aspects of doing a literature search. Even if you don’t have to do a full systematic literature review, you will need to find relevant literature for your research topic, and you should be able to manage all the literature that you collect.

In this course, using your own topic, you will create a search profile and use that profile in academic databases to do a structured literature search.

To manage your literature you can make use of a reference manager. We will discuss the pros and cons of different reference managers.

Entry level and relevance

No prior knowledge or experience is needed to participate in this course. The course can be useful for students in any phase of a PhD trajectory who are not completely sure how to collect literature that is relevant for their research.

Relation with other courses

This course can be attended either before or after the more comprehensive literature assessment approaches that are discussed in the EGSH courses Doing the systematic literature review and Research synthesis and meta-analysis.

Further, this course offers an example of the bibliometric output that can be generated by the program VOSviewer. A more comprehensive explanation of this program is offered by a separate EGSH course, called Visual exploration of scientific literature with VOSviewer.

How to prepare

Before the course starts, the lecturer will ask you to choose a topic that you can use for practicing the literature search, and to send her the questions (if you have any) that you like to discuss during the course.