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A fixed submission or graduation deadline should determine when earlier research milestones need to happen. Work backward from the true final requirement, account for dependencies and review time, and identify early when the proposed study no longer fits the available time.
Read Guide →A research problem can be genuine without being important enough to justify another study. Evaluate what would change if the problem were better understood and whether that knowledge warrants the cost of obtaining it.
Read Guide →A study does not need to be unprecedented to make a worthwhile contribution. The stronger question is whether the evidence it produces would add something meaningfully distinct to what researchers can already know, explain, test, or decide.
Read Guide →Research can generate new information without generating useful knowledge. Before conducting a study, ask whether knowing the answer would meaningfully change understanding, explanation, decisions, methods, or future research.
Read Guide →A study can be scientifically worthwhile and methodologically sound yet still be infeasible within the time available. Test the complete research pathway, including waiting periods and realistic delays, before committing to the design.
Read Guide →You do not need to personally possess every skill a study requires. You do need a credible plan for ensuring that the necessary substantive, methodological, technical, and operational expertise is available when the research needs it.
Read Guide →Before defending a proposed study, try to make the strongest evidence-based case for not doing it. Serious objections can expose weak assumptions, unnecessary research, poor feasibility, or a better way to answer the question.
Read Guide →Forget for a moment that the proposal, literature review, instruments, or preliminary work already exist. If you were choosing among research ideas today using everything you now know, would this still be the one you select?
Read Guide →A convincing research justification should survive one deceptively simple question: why does this particular study need to exist? The answer requires more than novelty, a literature gap, or an interesting topic.
Read Guide →A search strategy is more than a list of keywords. It is a deliberate plan connecting your research question to searchable concepts, appropriate terminology, information sources, query structure, and decisions about how the search will be tested and documented.
Read Guide →Not every literature search needs to be systematic. The appropriate level of rigor depends on what the search is supposed to accomplish, how the literature will be used, and how strongly your conclusions depend on identifying the relevant evidence.
Read Guide →Systematic, reproducible, and comprehensive describe different qualities of literature searching. A search can be reproducible without being comprehensive, systematic without achieving perfect coverage, or extensive without being sufficiently documented to reproduce.
Read Guide →There is no universal number of databases, papers, or search results that makes a literature search good enough. Adequacy depends on the study, the role the literature plays in it, and whether the search can support the claims you intend to make.
Read Guide →You do not need systematic-review-level documentation for every literature search, but keeping a proportionate record can make your research easier to revisit, update, explain, and defend.
Read Guide →A journal article needs enough literature searching to support its claims and position its contribution accurately, but not every article requires an exhaustive search. The appropriate depth depends on what the paper is trying to establish.
Read Guide →A systematic review search should be comprehensive enough to make missing eligible evidence unlikely and reproducible enough for readers to understand what was searched. Thoroughness depends on the review question and eligible evidence, not a universal number of databases.
Read Guide →A research gap is a claim about what the existing literature does not adequately know or explain, so it requires more than failing to find a paper in an initial search. Search broadly enough to test the proposed gap against alternative terminology, evidence, and explanations.
Read Guide →A reproducible search becomes necessary when literature retrieval is part of the research method or when important conclusions depend on what the search did and did not find. Reproducibility requires more than listing databases and keywords.
Read Guide →A librarian-designed search is particularly valuable when missing relevant evidence could affect a systematic review, strong absence claim, high-stakes research decision, or complex interdisciplinary search. Not every literature search requires specialist design.
Read Guide →A practical step-by-step guide to searching the research literature effectively. Learn how to turn a research question into a reproducible search strategy, choose databases, find search terms, refine results, and document what you did.
Read Guide →Your first literature search usually should be broad enough to reveal the terminology and shape of the literature, but not so broad that the results become meaningless. Learn how to find a useful starting point and refine it deliberately.
Read Guide →Thousands of results do not automatically mean your literature search is too broad. Learn how to diagnose excessive irrelevant retrieval and narrow a search without unnecessarily losing relevant studies.
Read Guide →A small result set does not necessarily mean your literature search is too narrow. Learn how to detect when restrictions, missing terminology, or excessive concept blocks are causing relevant studies to disappear.
Read Guide →Peer review can be useful when evaluating research, but restricting a literature search to peer-reviewed publications can exclude relevant evidence. Learn when broader searching matters and how to decide what should ultimately be included.
Read Guide →A literature search is difficult to reproduce if you record only the keywords or database names. Learn what to save while searching so the strategy can later be reported, checked, updated, and rerun.
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