Tips for Literature Research

In literature research, you research readily available data to formulate a problem definition. Some cases have been studied before, and there is no need to reinvent the wheel. By doing literature research, you can gather a lot of information. I will give you eleven tips for doing literature research:

1. Much information is already available. Through literature review, you can gather a lot of information about trends, market movements, market structure, and developments without having to do the fieldwork.
2. The literature review will form a clear purpose/research question and sub-questions that you want the answers to.
3. Provide keywords and search terms derived from your purpose/research question. This will give you a direction to research relevant literature.
4. Look for references and source citations to other publications in relevant articles. This will give you what is known as the snowball effect to new information.
5. Gather current information.
6. Turn the collected literature into one document, adding only the relevant information that answers the research question.
7. Keep track of what information you get from where, so you and your client can see which sources were used.
8. Mention the sources using the APA rules to avoid plagiarism.
9. Important when you are doing desk research is to check the relevance of the data. Does this information answer your problem definition?
10. Ensure to have multiple sources. This makes the data more reliable.
11. Provide reliable sources, such as (scientific) articles through Google Scholar, published studies on official websites, or sources from the library.