Get automatically up-to-date on your topic

Here is a very simple way to keep up-to-date in your subject area.

1. Search for your topic using an EBSCOhost database (see our list of databases here).

2. Narrow down your search until it's rather specific.

3. Create an email alert for that search by following the explanations of the video below.

Good luck!

3 simple steps to find more relevant articles on your topic

Do you struggle to find documents on your topic?
The good news is that if you have just one relevant paper, then you can use that one to find many others.

Take that one interesting paper and check the following:

• Are there other papers written by that author?
• Are there interesting papers mentioned in the paper's bibliography?
• Has this paper been cited by others?

Then, do the same thing for any paper you've found.

This is called the "snowball technique"... and it can lead you to end up with a huge amount of papers!
So always make sure that the new papers you find are actually directly relevant to your topic before you start researching them...

In the video below, you will see in details how to apply this technique, using EBSCOhost databases and Google Scholar.

Tweaking your literature search to get relevant results

Once you've done a literature search and you start looking at the results, you might get surprised...
If you're lucky, most of the results will be actually relevant to your topic.
But very often, this won't be the case.

If most of your results are not actually on the topic you were researching, you can use the following techniques to modify your search:

• Do the search again using a "field";
• Limit your search by subject; or
• Add another term to your search.

Here are detailed explanations, in video:

How to do a literature search (the basics)

Searching the literature is not a very straightforward process.

In this video, I explain (in the same way that I do in class) how to do a "good" literature search and I point out good searching habits that you should take on!

How to adopt an efficient search strategy

When doing a literature search in a bibliographic database, how do you make sure that you've found all existing documents on your topic?

In the video below, I'm explaining how to analyse your topic, come up with good keywords, and come up with an efficient search strategy.

In this example, I use the database PsycINFO through the platform EBSCOhost.

Accessing PsycINFO from the library's website

Do you need to do a literature review on a topic in psychological therapies?
Do you need to find an article in the field of psychology?
Then a good tool to use in the bibliographic database called PsycINFO.

Here, I made an extra-short video reminding you how to access it from the library's website.

Good luck with your search!

Questions from students: Geographical Limitation

During a session on literature search, a student asked me if it was possible to limit results to a particular geographic area.

From what I can see, when using the EbscoHOST databases that we have access to at Tavistock and Portman, the "geography" limiter (to limit your search to a particular country) seems to pop up depending on the database you’re using.

For example, you can use it with SocIndex, CINAHL or Medline.

It doesn't seem to be available in PsycINFO at the moment, but you can still use the field "PL Location" when you set up your advanced search.



Click on the image to enlarge it.



You might want to try different names (for example, “England”, “Great Britain”, “United Kingdom”, “Europe”) depending on the geographical area you’re searching, to be sure to be completely thorough.