Library:Library Research Skills For Land and Food Systems/Module 04A/Page 02

How can I use this?

By using article indexes I can create a systematic and reproducible search for the most relevant articles and books on my topic.

Completeness and relevance of your results

In module 3C, we used Summon to find journal articles. Summon is a great place to start your search, but if you are having difficulty finding information you need, or you are doing advanced literature searching, note that by only using Summon you may be missing out on articles relevant to your research. In this module we will expand our search strategies to make sure we have a complete search and the most relevant literature. Thinking about your search, you will want to make sure it is both complete – it is broad enough to find all of the relevant articles on your topic and relevant – the results are focused on your topic. If you are writing an in-depth paper, creating a capstone project, an undergraduate thesis or a graduate thesis, you will need to create a literature review. A key part of a literature review is finding all of the important resources and articles on a topic. This module will cover techniques to help with that process.