Follow the Twitter accounts of scholars or organizations important to your research. Your peers will be good sources for identifying useful social media options in your discipline, and you can make recommendations to your graduate students.
This page provides more general academic social media resources that will address higher education topics such as news, pedagogy, technology, employment, and more.
To find blogs on topics of interest, consult with faculty, peers, explore professional association websites, and be creative! Google searches that combine keywords for your discipline with the term 'blog' can be a way to identify useful and interesting blogs.
Blogs can be monitored individually, using web browser bookmarks, or aggregated via an RSS newsreader service.
My thanks to Lorrie Pellack, Iowa State University Library,
whose work informed this guide.
More complete lists of pre-publication repositories
Many tools are being developed as applications of machine learning and GPT-3 language models. Each application addresses a particular challenge experienced in the research process. Just a few of these tools are linked here. Some of these are free, some offer a free trial period, others are fee-based. Each varies in how explicit they are about the sources of their citation data, how frequently it is updated, or any biases of subject coverage or content.
If you work with a tool not listed below, please share it and your experience!
Search NUSearch for journal titles dedicated to publishing review articles start with the search strategy illustrated below. Titles found with this search strategy are predominantly in science, medicine, and technology fields.
1. In the ADVANCED SEARCH option of the database, is there a DOCUMENT TYPE filter that can be used to limit your search results?
2. Is a THESAURUS provided by the database?
If the Thesaurus identifies 'literature review' as a searchable subject term, combine it with topical keywords or additional thesaurus terms related to your topic.
3. Some databases provide INDEXES rather than a Thesaurus. Select the SUBJECT INDEX and search for the term 'literature review'. Combine with terms that describe your topic.
The definitions provided here were found in Sage Research Methods.
Literature review:
Narrative review is a synonym of Literature review
A literature review is a descriptive and/or analytic summary of the existing material relating to some topic or area of study. The term also refers to the process of producing such a review.
Integrative literature review:
A form of research that that generates new knowledge about the reviewed topic. Relevant literature is reviewed, critiqued, and synthesized in such a way that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic can be generated.
Meta-analysis:
Statistical methods for formally contrasting and combining results from different studies in the hope of identifying patterns or other interesting relationships among study results.
Scoping review:
A review used to determine the scope or coverage of a body of literature on a given topic, and to provide a general overview of that topic. In contrast to a systematic review, which generally starts with a clearly defined question, this approach allows for a more general exploration of the related literature.
Systematic review:
A systematic review is a review of the literature that is conducted in a methodical manner based on a prespecified protocol and with the aim of synthesizing the retrieved information often by means of a meta-analysis.
NOTE: Northwestern University Libraries provides consultations for those conducting a Systematic Review of the literature in their discipline.
Ensuring that your literature review incorporates a wide range of views by diverse scholars in your discipline is an ongoing challenge. Neither the publishing industry, nor the peer review process itself, is free of the biases of systemic racism, or the societal biases oppressing those of non-majority gender or sexual identities, or those with differing physical abilities. One strategy is to use library databases that specifically incorporate publications serving diverse communities when searching for literature. Examples include Ethnic Newswatch and the Gender Studies Database. These databases and more are linked from:
Additional strategies discussed elsewhere on this guide can help reduce this bias including:
There are efforts to highlight the expertise or published work of diverse scholars such as:
And efforts to improve the visibility, accessibility, and quality of journals published outside the dominant Western, often English-language, channels of scholarship.
Please share your successful strategies and helpful resources so they can be added to this guide to help others!!
My thanks to Brie Baumert, Gould Library, Carleton College, whose work on
Inclusive Searching identified many of the resources linked here.
Northwestern University Libraries provides consultations for those conducting a Systematic Review of the literature in their discipline.
Conducting your literature review by 
Doing a Literature Review, 2nd edition by 
Doing Your Literature Review: Traditional and Systematic Techniques. by 
Writing the Literature Review by Click on the 3 horizontal lines in the top left corner of the screen to bring up this menu. Select Advanced Search.
The Advanced Search screen provides several self-explanatory field options to increase the precision of your search results. Highlighted in this image is the option to specify a publication title.
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