(See also Literature Review on the Assignment Genre page)
Key terms: literature search; scholarly research literature; research journals; validity; reliability; peer review; full-text; open access; popular literature.
Literature searches are an important part of the research and academic writing process. Here is a background explanation that will assist you in conducting literature searches.
What is scholarly research literature?
The phrase scholarly research literature refers to published research in academic research journals. Research journals are the method by which researchers announce their research findings to the world. The gold standard of academic research publishing is journals that publish peer-reviewed articles. Peer review is the process of critical scrutiny by experts that each article submitted for publication is subjected to. If an article is accepted for publication after peer review by two or more experts in the field, the methodology and findings of the research study that the article reports on are accepted as demonstrating validity and reliability—important principles in research. These are the types of articles that other academics rely upon and base their research studies on.
Where do I find peer-reviewed, full-text, research articles?
Most research journals are not freely available to the public. The libraries of academic institutions such as Morling College pay a subscription fee for their students and staff to have access to databases that contain hundreds of research journals. The names of the journal databases Morling students use are EBSCO and ProQuest.
EBSCO and ProQuest contain difference types of resources. When searching in these databases, refine your search to journal articles that are both peer reviewed and full-text. If you don’t select the full-text filter, the results may contain index records that include the abstract, citation and perhaps the references but not the actual text of the article. Once you have established what the key terms are, try searching using different forms of the word, for example, well being, well-being, wellbeing.
Some peer-reviewed, full-text journals are open access, which means that they are freely available on the internet. A good way to locate these journals is through Google Scholar. However, only use articles from recognised academic publishers’ websites as there are journals that masquerade as academic journals but their editors do not uphold accepted standards of academic rigour.
Many researchers make a draft or pre-press copy of their paper available on a repository or their personal websites. Most research articles go through one or more revisions in the course of the peer-review process so the pre-press copy is not a reliable version as there is no way of knowing what changes have been made. Find the published version. If you find that the published version is in a journal that Morling students do not have access to, you can choose to pay a one-off fee to obtain a copy of the journal article yourself or accept that the article is not available to you.
When keyword searches in the databases are not effective
In this case, it can be very helpful to browse research articles in the educational research journals that we have access to such as Australian Educational Researcher, Australian Journal of Education, Curriculum Perspectives, and International Journal of Christianity & Education (former title Journal of Christian Education). When you find your first suitable article, before reading it, look at the key words on the first page and the reference list to see the key terms used. Use those key terms in your next literature search on EBSCO and ProQuest. When searching for ideas or to learn the key terminology and key researchers in your field, do not use the full-text filter as if you access even just the title, author, abstract and reference list, this can help you locate valuable articles.
What about books?
Since you are working at Master’s level, the majority of your sources should be peer-reviewed journal articles written by the researchers themselves. However, many researchers, once their research credibility is established through publishing in peer-reviewed, research journals, go on to write books about their work in order to make it available to a wider audience. It is acceptable to supplement your research articles with a small number of books if the books are from an authoritative source.
If you find a book from popular literature you would like to use in your literature review, perform a literature search to see if the author(s) has a research track record. If you can’t find any research articles by them, this book is not scholarly literature and should not be used in a literature review. (Exceptions are for the purposes of critique, e.g. as an example of popular culture, or as the source of an idea that you are critiquing in the light of the research literature.)
Sometimes it can be challenging to determine the genre a book belongs to: popular or scholarly literature. Popular literature is usually available through regular bookshops (e.g. the top 100 best-sellers) and, in Australia, is the type of literature on the shelves of local community libraries. Scholarly books are usually available through specialist bookshops such as university bookshops and are found on the shelves of university libraries.