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Preprints can provide timely access to research before journal peer review, particularly in rapidly developing fields. Whether you should include them depends on your review purpose, eligibility criteria, and how carefully you manage their provisional and versioned status.
Read Guide →Government consultations can expose research, administrative data, expert evidence, and organizational knowledge that never reaches academic journals. Their usefulness depends on what the document contains and how critically you evaluate it.
Read Guide →Technical reports can provide methodological and implementation detail that a journal article compresses or omits. More detail is useful, but it does not automatically make the report more rigorous.
Read Guide →Some organizations conduct substantial research but rarely publish it in academic journals. Finding their work requires searching organizations, repositories, websites, references, and research networks rather than relying only on bibliographic databases.
Read Guide →Negative and null studies can be disproportionately difficult to find because some never reach journals. Finding them requires tracing studies independently of their results through registries, grants, reports, organizations, references, and researcher contact.
Read Guide →Searching for unpublished evidence can reduce important blind spots, but the search cannot continue indefinitely. The appropriate effort depends on the review question, risk of missing evidence, likely value of additional searching, and available resources.
Read Guide →Local and internationally indexed journals may differ in visibility, audience, and external vetting, but those differences should not become shortcuts for judging individual studies. Evaluate journal practices and study quality separately.
Read Guide →Local evidence may be distributed across theses, government reports, institutional repositories, technical documents, and other grey literature rather than conventional journals. Finding it requires searching the organizations and systems that produce the evidence, not only bibliographic databases.
Read Guide →A language barrier does not automatically make an important research source unusable. Translation tools can help you determine relevance and sometimes understand substantial portions of a paper, but important methodological, numerical, or interpretive claims may require verification by a fluent reader or reliable human translation.
Read Guide →Different versions of the same paper can contain more than formatting changes. Learn how to identify each version, trace what changed, and decide which information is appropriate to use.
Read Guide →Not every inaccessible paper deserves the same retrieval effort. Learn how to decide when another search, library request, or author email is justified and when it is reasonable to stop.
Read Guide →A paper belongs in your literature review because it helps answer the review question and meets the criteria appropriate to your review, not simply because it appeared in your search. Learn how to make inclusion decisions consistently and transparently.
Read Guide →Relevance and methodological quality answer different questions in a literature review. A study may be highly relevant yet methodologically weak, and whether that weakness warrants exclusion depends on the review design and criteria established in advance.
Read Guide →Two papers are not necessarily two independent studies. Learn how to compare study identifiers, participants, recruitment periods, settings, methods, and other clues to determine whether publications report the same underlying study.
Read Guide →You rarely need to read every research paper from the first word to the last. Learn a practical multi-pass method for deciding what deserves attention, extracting the important evidence, and knowing when a paper requires a deeper read.
Read Guide →You rarely need to read every research paper from the first word to the last. The depth and order of your reading should depend on why you opened the paper and what you need to learn from it.
Read Guide →Not every paper you find deserves the same amount of attention. Screen its relevance first, then consider whether the evidence, methods, and role it may play in your research justify a deeper reading.
Read Guide →You do not need the same depth of understanding for every research paper you encounter. The more consequential the paper is to your argument, methodology, or interpretation, the more deeply you need to understand the parts on which you rely.
Read Guide →You do not need to scrutinize the methods of every paper during your first pass. Read them closely when your interpretation, citation, methodological decision, or confidence in a finding depends on how the evidence was produced.
Read Guide →You do not need to be a statistician to make sense of many statistical results. Start with the research question and comparison, then examine the effect estimate, its uncertainty, and what the analysis actually allows you to conclude.
Read Guide →You do not need to master every unfamiliar method before you can learn from a paper. First identify exactly what you do not understand, determine whether it matters to your purpose, and investigate it deeply enough to interpret the evidence responsibly.
Read Guide →Good research notes are not miniature copies of the papers you read. Record what you will need later: the study's question, relevant evidence, limitations, your interpretation, and why the paper matters to your research.
Read Guide →Do not extract everything simply because it appears in the paper. Capture the study's question, context, design, sample or data, relevant measures or procedures, findings, limitations, and why the study matters to your research.
Read Guide →Reading the conclusion first can frame your expectations before you inspect the evidence. That does not automatically make your interpretation biased, but it gives you a reason to check the authors' claims independently against the study's methods and results.
Read Guide →Before judging a study's findings, determine exactly what question its design and analysis were capable of answering. The stated aim is only the starting point.
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