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Psychology & Counselling

Subject support guide for psychology and counselling.

What is 'Literature Searching'?

Literature search is a 'thorough search of the available literature (books, journal articles and reports) on a topic beyond your reading list. (LSE, 2023)

Booth et al (2023) described the purpose of literature search as the process of seeking and identifying information to:

1. Provide background and context.

2. Identify a gap.

3. Provide justification for your work.

4. Investigate potential methodologies the might be useful. 

You can find different literatures/resources via the library homepage, OR you can also check recommended resources on this page.

Systematic and Scoping Literature Searches

This section is aimed at postgraduate psychology students who will be undertaking a systematic literature search for their thesis and require guidance on performing effective and comprehensive searches. The guide may be useful for students on other programmes, but they should seek guidance from their tutor and/or their academic services librarian in the first instance.

Scoping search

“Preliminary search designed to (i) identify existing reviews in your topic area and (ii) estimate the existing quantity and quality of relevant primary studies. Typically, scoping searches do not aim to be fully comprehensive.”  Booth et al (2022, p. 23)

Scoping search should:

  • Help confirm the gaps in the literature.
  • Give an indication of the amount  of search. 

In terms of where to search, scoping the literature in one or two databases is valuable and sufficient in indicating how much literature already exists (Atkinson & Cipriani, 2018).

Tip:

Focus on using terms that will retrieve results that are highly likely to be relevant if present, rather than broader search terms that will bring back a lot of irrelevant articles (Booth et al., 2022). Index terms can be particularly useful in ensuring a narrow, focused search of the literature.

Systematic search

A scoping search should inform a systematic search of the literature, particularly in terms of helping to identify keywords and develop a search string that will ensure a comprehensive search of the literature.

When conducting a systematic search of the literature, there are a few things to consider:

  1. What keywords and index terms do you need to use to ensure a thorough search of the literature?
  2. Which databases are relevant for your research? Think broadly about your subject, don’t just restrict yourself to APA PsycInfo.
  3. What is your inclusion/exclusion criteria?
  4. Explore terms used in articles found in your scoping search to inform your search strategy.
  5. Create your search string with a mixture of subject terms and keywords (where appropriate) and using search operators (see below). Search each of the identified databases using your search terms (your search string may need to be adapted for each database, depending on the features available).
  6. Collect identified, relevant papers in reference management software, such as Zotero (we provide support for both Zotero and Mendeley).

 

A number of databases use subject terms as a way of categorising items within a database. These terms are applied using a specific thesaurus or controlled vocabulary to ensure all items within the database are categorised in exactly the same way.

Databases that include a thesaurus or controlled vocabulary include:

APA PsycArticles/PsycInfo - APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms

Ebsco Academic Search Complete – Subject Terms

MEDLINE (PubMed) - Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

The Cochrane Handbook (Searching for and Selecting Studies, 2022) suggests searches should comprise a combination of subject terms selected from the controlled vocabulary or thesaurus (‘exploded' where appropriate), and a wide range of free-text terms in order to retrieve as many relevant records as possible.

• If you use keywords only, you could miss articles that do not use your precise terms.

• If you use controlled vocabulary only, you could miss articles that have not been indexed yet or have older indexing.

Atkinson, L. Z., & Cipriani, A. (2018). How to carry out a literature search for a systematic review: A practical guide. BJPsych Advances, 24(2), 74–82. https://doi.org/10.1192/bja.2017.3

Booth, A., Sutton, A., Clowes, M., & Martyn-St James, M. (2022). Systematic approaches to a successful literature review (Third edition). SAGE. (LibrarySearch link)

Searching for and selecting studies. (2022). Cohrane Training: Chapter 4: Searching for and Selecting Studies. https://training.cochrane.org/handbook/current/chapter-04#section-4-4-4