Search across guide titles, topics, keywords, and content throughout the Researcher's Field Guide.
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A research protocol needs enough literature searching to justify why the study should be conducted and why its methods are appropriate. The required depth depends on the study, its risks, and the claims the protocol makes about existing evidence.
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 quick exploratory search is often enough when your goal is orientation rather than a definitive claim about the literature. Use it to learn terminology, locate key papers, test feasibility, and decide what kind of searching should come next.
Read Guide →A good research question is written to express what you want to know, not necessarily how a database stores that knowledge. Learn how to translate your question into searchable concepts without losing its meaning.
Read Guide →Not every concept in a research question should automatically become a required search term. Learn how to decide which concepts belong in your search and which may make it unnecessarily restrictive.
Read Guide →For systematic reviews, eligibility criteria should normally be defined before the formal search and study-selection process. Preliminary searching can still help you understand the literature and refine defensible criteria before they are finalized.
Read Guide →Study designs should usually be considered before a structured literature search, but the right designs depend on the question being asked. Deciding what evidence can answer the question is different from automatically filtering the database by study-design labels.
Read Guide →Subject-specific and multidisciplinary databases serve different purposes in literature searching. Learn how their coverage, indexing, and search features differ and when your research may benefit from using one or both.
Read Guide →Google Scholar and Google search different information environments. Learn when Google Scholar is better for scholarly literature, when regular Google is more useful, and how researchers can use both strategically.
Read Guide →Specialized databases can reveal literature, terminology, indexing, and document types that broad multidisciplinary databases may not capture as effectively. Learn when your research question warrants searching them.
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 →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 →Thousands of search results do not necessarily mean your search has failed. Diagnose why the search is broad, then improve precision through better terms, concept structure, fields, phrases, proximity, or justified limits without quietly changing the research question.
Read Guide →A high citation count shows that a paper has attracted substantial scholarly attention, but it does not automatically prove quality, importance, or relevance. Learn what citations can tell you, what they cannot, and how to interpret them responsibly.
Read Guide →“Related articles” and “similar papers” can uncover useful research from a single relevant paper, but similarity is algorithmic rather than a guarantee of relevance. Learn how these tools work, what they can find, and when you should use them cautiously.
Read Guide →The paper with the most citations is not necessarily the paper that introduced an idea. Citation prominence reflects how later scholarship uses a publication, while intellectual priority requires tracing and verifying where the contribution actually originated.
Read Guide →Do not assume that a cited paper supports the claim attached to it. Retrieve the original source, locate the relevant passage, examine its context and evidence, and compare what the paper actually concludes with what later authors say it concluded.
Read Guide →You do not need to repeat the same literature searches every week to stay current. Build a monitoring system using saved searches, database alerts, citation alerts, journal notifications, and a short routine for reviewing what arrives.
Read Guide →Newer research is not automatically more important than older research. An older study may deserve priority when it established an idea, provides uniquely relevant evidence, documents an earlier period, or remains central to the evidence base.
Read Guide →A preprint can give you early access to important research, but being new does not make it important or reliable. Evaluate its relevance, methods, evidence, transparency, version history, and publication status before deciding how much attention it deserves.
Read Guide →Continuous literature monitoring is justified when important new evidence appears frequently enough that waiting for occasional search updates could affect research or decisions. It should be systematic and sustainable, not literally constant.
Read Guide →Grey literature includes research and other evidence produced outside conventional academic and commercial publishing. Learn what counts as grey literature and when searching for it can materially improve a literature review.
Read Guide →Government and institutional reports can contain valuable research evidence, including surveys, evaluations, administrative analyses, and technical studies. Their authority as documents, however, should not be confused with the methodological strength of the evidence they contain.
Read Guide →A report does not become unreliable simply because it was never peer reviewed, but you cannot assume that someone else has checked it for you. Evaluate its provenance, methods, data, transparency, potential bias, and the strength of the claims it actually supports.
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