Your search strategy begins with brainstorming keywords to construct great searches, but it doesn't have to end there. If you find that you are doing more scrolling than finding, you may find it useful to try citation mining. Citation mining means looking at the citations of books and articles that are related to your topic to find more sources that you can use. This is especially useful if you have a found a review article (literature, systematic, meta-analysis) related to your topic.
1. To start, choose one good, relevant scholarly article.
2. Look at the bibliography or reference list of the article to see if the author(s) used sources that could also help in your research.
3. When you find an article or book that looks relevant, search for it in the libraries databases to see if we have access to it. The best way to do this is to search the title of the book or article by copy and pasting it into the Search Everything search box on the Libraries homepage.
4. Select the correct book or article from the search results and check to see if we have full access.
5. If not, request the item using Interlibrary Loan.
If you discover that an author is an authority on your topic, you can search the authors name in the Libraries databases to find a list of their publications. This may lead you to additional articles related to your topic.
1. Use the authors last name, first name (or first initial) as a search term in a database search box.
Acardi, SA
2. If you have run a keyword search in a database and found an important author, click on their name in an article record to get a list of works published under that specific author identification.
As you gather articles related to your topic, you might discover that some of your articles were published in the same journal. It is very possible that one of the leading journals in a field publishes on one topic more than another journal. It can be helpful to search within a specific journal to find other relevant articles. There are two ways to do this.
Journals A-Z Search, on the Libraries homepage, allows you to search for journals by title or ISSN to see which volumes the library has, either electronically or print.
If you are conducting a keyword search in a database, you can click on the journal title listed in any search result. This will also take you to the journal's homepage within the database.
