To search for scholarly works for a dissertation, define your core research questions, identify relevant academic databases, and use strategic keywords to find peer-reviewed literature. Conducting a comprehensive literature search is the foundation of your dissertation, ensuring you understand the existing academic landscape and can clearly identify your research gap.
Here is a step-by-step approach to finding the best academic sources for your research:
1. Define Your Keywords and Concepts
Before opening a search engine, break your dissertation topic down into core concepts. Brainstorm a list of primary keywords, synonyms, and related terms. Academic authors often use varying terminology, so having a broad list of keywords ensures you won't miss critical peer-reviewed articles simply because an author used a different phrase.
2. Choose the Right Academic Databases
Start with broad academic search engines to get a feel for the literature, then move to subject-specific databases. Common multidisciplinary platforms include Google Scholar, JSTOR, and Scopus, while databases like PubMed, APA PsycNet, or IEEE Xplore are essential for specific fields. If you are tired of sifting through irrelevant results, you can use WisPaper's Scholar Search, which uses AI to understand your underlying research intent rather than just matching exact keywords, filtering out the noise.
3. Use Advanced Search Techniques
To narrow down thousands of search results into a manageable, highly relevant list, apply advanced search strategies:
- Boolean Operators: Use AND to combine concepts (e.g., climate AND agriculture), OR to include synonyms, and NOT to exclude irrelevant terms.
- Phrase Searching: Put quotation marks around specific phrases (e.g., "machine learning") to search for those exact words in that order.
- Filters: Limit your searches by publication date to find recent studies, or filter by document type to focus exclusively on peer-reviewed journal articles and academic books.
4. Practice Citation Snowballing
Once you find a highly relevant, foundational paper for your dissertation, use it to find more. "Backward snowballing" involves reviewing the paper's reference list to find older, foundational scholarly works. "Forward snowballing" involves looking at which newer papers have cited that foundational article, helping you track how the research has evolved up to the present day.
5. Organize as You Go
A dissertation requires tracking hundreds of scholarly sources. Do not wait until you start writing to organize your literature. Use a reference management tool to save your PDFs, generate citations, and take notes on how each paper connects to your specific dissertation chapters. Staying organized from day one will save you countless hours during the writing and formatting process.
