Whether you call it a literature survey or a literature review ...

Library help with your literature search

Some years ago, we authored a blogpost about writing your literature review.  Revisiting it today, we found - oh, horror! - that although the advice was good, the weblinks needed updating. We've got a new library catalogue now, so the old links were no use at all!  Anyway, here we are again, refreshed and updated for today's students:- 

Writing a research proposal: the literature survey

Let's assume you've got an idea for a research project, and you've got to submit something in writing. The following observations might help, if you're writing a proposal for an undergraduate or postgraduate degree research project. (This is NOT about writing dozens of pages, describing scientific methods or submitting costings for a funding bid!) 

• Have you established how much you are expected to write? 
• Do you have any indication how many citations you should come up with? 
• Have you been given any guidance about the currency of your citations?

The Whittaker Library supports staff and students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in their general studies and subject-specific research.  Our focus is the performing arts: music, drama, production, film, and dance.  If you were putting together a literature review for a scientific research project, you'd probably be much more concerned about currency.  (No point in outlining what you think is a cutting-edge piece of research in pharmacology, if someone else did something very similar months or even years ago!)

The purpose of your literature review is to show that you know what's out there already.  The format of what you find (book, journal article, website etc) is not so important as the content.  Nonetheless, you'll make yourself look more convincing as a researcher if you show that you know about the most useful electronic resources.

The Whittaker Library offers a lot of subject-specific and more generic electronic resources.  Here are some tried and trusted suggestions for where to begin:-

1. See what's in the Library catalogue - are there any key resources that you might use as a starting point, or that you that you wish to argue with?!
2. Try our Catalogue Plus search, to see what electronic resources are available.  (Start on the same catalogue page, but select the Catalogue Plus option before you enter your search terms.  Choose to get full-text results, and consider doing an advanced search for further refinements of your search.  NB if you're off-site, you'll need to login in order to access the articles themselves.)
3. Anyone can do a Copac library search, which will check all the UK national and university libraries at once. If you find something good that we haven't got in our library, we can consider getting an inter library loan for you, or purchasing a copy for our collection.
4.  Zetoc is a good general resource, too.You can search for citations or set up alerts to be notified about future writings on your research topic.
5. There's nothing wrong with using Google Scholar, but it's slightly better for the sciences than for the performing arts.  Just don't use it as your sole source - use it at the end, as a way of checking if you've missed anything.

If your research is going to be inter-disciplinary (eg combining music and drama), then the general searches are very important: you never know where your most likely sources will come from.  But don't forget to look at subject-specific bibliographic resources, too.  There are electronic abstracts and indexes especially for music, or for drama and dance.

How much time to spend?  Some people spend weeks, dipping in and out of resources before deciding what to include.  If you've got a limited amount of time, say a half-day, why not allocate half an hour to each of the activities outlined above, then spend half an hour to an hour synthesising your findings and writing about what you've found?

Once you've written about what you've found, it's a good idea to put these resources in a neat, succinct bibliography, too.  That shows you understand the discipline of precise, accurate citation.  E.g.,  

• Atkinson, Charles M., The Critical Nexus: Tone-System, Mode, and Notation in Early Mediaeval Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

•  Steyn, Carol, 'The Music Manuscripts of the Grey Collection in Cape Town and their European Connections', Fontes Vol.59 no.1 (2012), 45-56

Note that the first is a book; the second a journal article.  Bibliographies are in alphabetical order of author, but you describe books and journals slightly differently. 

As soon as you start your research, you need to think much more deeply about bibliographies and ways of keeping track of your references.  There are different referencing styles, and a variety of online systems that can be a great help.  But that's further down the line.

Good luck!