Dear academics,
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is there any reliable way to search specifically for a literature review?
Like suppose I don't want to become an expert on the psychology of moral learning, but I do want to have a sense of the general literature and positions in that literature. I find myself on Google Scholar sorting through hundreds of articles, and it feels extremely inefficient. Is there a better way?
@pjw@academicchatter this is where specific journals become great as filters for types of info.
Not sure if you have access to paywalled stuff through univ or something like the Wikipedia editor supports, but journals by "Annual Reviews", "Current Opinions", "Trends in" or "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society" are all primarily/only review articles on invited topics where the journal's editors felt it was worth giving the field an update. 🙂
@pjw
In history there are articles titled "state of the field" that exist for exactly this reason, so if you're looking for history you can search for that plus the topic. I don't know if similar genres exist in other fields @academicchatter
In science there are also "review" articles that are basically that. In astro we even have journals dedicated to just reviews of various topics. So you could add "review" to your search terms.
@pjw@academicchatter I'd also recommend googling for grad seminar syllabi on the topics you're interested in. Many of them are entirely a list of relevant current or contextually important publications
Trying to find only research articles (or review essays) is an interesting puzzle.
As others have mentioned, checking with an academic librarian for a curated list, and conducting boolean searches, are great starting points.
Some journals publish literature reviews (we don't, specifically, though we do publish evidence summaries of specific research articles).
However, there are some really cool tool you can use to improve the chances of finding things!
ResearchRabbit and Connected Papers allow you to find work that is connected, in some way, to a work that you specify - could be same author, same field, cited by, etc.
2Dsearch can be helpful, especially for anyone not used to boolean searching.
@pjw@academicchatter is there a specific journal that only does reviews in you field? You could try to narrow the search. Especially when you use scopus or web of science.
@Marrekoo@academicchatter
There is in my field (Philosophy Compass, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), but I'm not sure about other fields. There is a Psychology Compass, but actually more often I have found literature reviews elsewhere.
@pjw@academicchatter What worked for me was to do a search like that and work backwards from the most recent one to make a list of the papers they quote. After 5 or 6 you'll get a good image of the most cited. Using Google Scholar or another search engine, you can then see who else has used these "authority" papers. And as said by others, a good title will help you identify the most relevant papers.
I think the type of article you're referring to is a 'review essay.' For instance: Greta Gaard, “Vegetarian Ecofeminism: A Review Essay,” Frontiers 23, no. 3 (2002): 117-146.
I've never seen a tick box for this sort of article so I don't know how you'd search for these alone.
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