Search across guide titles, topics, keywords, and content throughout the Researcher's Field Guide.
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Lacking access to Scopus, Web of Science, or another subscription database does not mean you cannot conduct a serious literature search. Learn how to identify suitable alternatives, use free scholarly resources, obtain articles legally, and report important limitations transparently.
Read Guide →One database can sometimes be enough for a focused research task, but there is no universal one-database rule. Whether it is defensible depends on the review purpose, subject coverage, evidence sought, and consequences of missing relevant studies.
Read Guide →A database can be enormous and still provide weak coverage of your particular field. Learn how to evaluate subject coverage, journals, publication types, years, languages, and known relevant literature before relying on it.
Read Guide →Preprint servers can reveal recent research before journal publication, but preprints have usually not completed formal peer review. Learn when searching them adds value and how to use their findings responsibly.
Read Guide →Theses and dissertations can reveal detailed studies, emerging research, negative or unpublished findings, and extensive references that journal databases may miss. Whether you should search them depends on your research question and review methodology.
Read Guide →Conference proceedings can contain important research that journal searches miss, particularly in conference-oriented and rapidly developing fields. Learn when to search them, where to look, and how to handle conference papers and abstracts responsibly.
Read Guide →The most important database is not necessarily the largest or most prestigious one. It is the database whose coverage, indexing, document types, and disciplinary focus best match the evidence your research question requires.
Read Guide →Your university's subscription determines which databases are convenient to access, not which databases are methodologically appropriate for your question. Database selection should be based primarily on relevance, coverage, and the purpose of your search.
Read Guide →A database can be large, international, and highly respected while still representing some countries or regions less completely than others. Geographic coverage should be examined whenever local or regional evidence matters to the research question.
Read Guide →Major databases include research published in languages other than English, but inclusion does not guarantee equal or comprehensive representation. Language coverage can affect what researchers find, particularly when relevant evidence is produced in multilingual or local publishing systems.
Read Guide →Research databases do not represent every discipline or scholarly tradition equally. Differences in publication formats, indexing practices, source selection, and disciplinary communication can substantially affect what a database makes visible.
Read Guide →Regional bibliographic databases can be important when your question depends on evidence from a particular country, region, language, or locally oriented research community. They usually complement rather than automatically replace major international databases.
Read Guide →Discipline-specific repositories can reveal research outputs that conventional bibliographic databases do not capture, capture later, or represent differently. Their usefulness depends on what the repository contains and whether those materials matter to your research question.
Read Guide →Trial registries can reveal ongoing, completed, terminated, and sometimes unpublished trials that journal databases may not identify. They are particularly important for systematic reviews of interventions and questions involving clinical trials.
Read Guide →Registration extends beyond conventional clinical trials. Depending on your field and question, other study registries and preregistration systems may reveal planned, ongoing, completed, or otherwise difficult-to-discover research.
Read Guide →Government databases can be the primary source when your question requires official statistics, regulations, administrative records, policy documents, agency reports, or other information produced by government itself. Academic databases and government sources often answer different parts of the same research question.
Read Guide →Professional and scholarly society websites can contain guidelines, standards, conference materials, reports, policy statements, and publications that are not fully represented in general academic databases. Search them when those outputs are relevant to your question and important within the field.
Read Guide →Institutional repositories can expose theses, manuscripts, conference materials, reports, and other research outputs produced by a particular university or organization. They are especially useful when institutional affiliation or locally deposited material matters to your search.
Read Guide →MeSH terms and other subject headings can retrieve research by standardized concepts, but they do not make keywords unnecessary. Using both can help you find indexed literature while also capturing newer records, alternative terminology, and concepts that subject headings may not fully represent.
Read Guide →Older literature may use terminology that is now considered inappropriate, yet those exact terms may still be necessary to retrieve historical evidence. The key is to separate methodological use in a search strategy from the language you adopt in your own writing.
Read Guide →Emerging topics rarely arrive with stable vocabulary. Build the search iteratively from seed records, competing labels, descriptive phrases, early terminology, and developing subject headings, then expect to revise it as the field matures.
Read Guide →Searching an academic database effectively takes more than typing a topic into a search box. Learn how researchers build keywords, use Boolean operators, control search fields, test queries, and refine search strategies.
Read Guide →AND can retrieve records where two terms occur anywhere in the searched fields, even when they are unrelated. Proximity searching requires terms to occur near each other, which can provide a useful middle ground between a loose AND search and an exact phrase.
Read Guide →Searching a term in the title, abstract, or keyword fields does not produce the same search. Each field represents an article differently, so choosing where to search can change both how much literature you retrieve and how relevant it is.
Read Guide →Full-text searching can find concepts buried in methods, results, tables, or discussions, but it can also retrieve articles that merely mention your term. Learn when the extra coverage is useful and when bibliographic fields provide a better search.
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