Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper

Exploratory Searching vs. Literature Review Searching

In most cases, identifying and writing about a topic requires an initial exploration of information sources. This process can be used to contextualize the research problem [i.e., obtain relevant background information that makes it easier to understand or explain the topic] and to help determine the study’s overall design and scope of analysis. Exploratory searching can also help establish where your ideas fit within what is already known about the problem. Sources may include reviewing the readings listed in the course syllabus and/or searching the Libraries’ catalog, Google Scholar, or general resources such as Wikipedia, government agencies or organizational websites, and national news outlets.

However, an initial search for information differs significantly from the search process applied to writing the literature review section of your paper.

• Scholarly Sources. Most writing assignments require that the majority of sources used to examine the research problem must be derived from scholarly and peer-reviewed materials, such as, books, book chapters, research reports, and academic journal articles. This is because evidence-based and outcomes-driven studies are the principal sources needed to delineate what researchers have already said about the topic.
• Thorough Coverage. Unlike any initial searching you may have conducted while contemplating what to write about, the literature review section requires a comprehensive survey of relevant research literature. The purpose is to inform the reader about how your paper relates to what has already been published about the topic. This can only be achieved if there is an extensive assessment of prior knowledge related to the objectives of your study.
• Deliberate Approach. Searching for studies that help contextualize and explain the significance of your research paper requires an intentional plan of action. Randomly searching the internet is not an effective, nor an efficient, strategy for locating pertinent research. Rather, preparing to write your literature review section must include a calculated plan for where to locate scholarly sources that will support the arguments presented in your paper.
• Focused Process. After you have drafted your paper's introduction, it is important to focus on searching for literature that helps the reader understand your justifications for investigating the research problem [i.e., framing the "So What?" question]. Avoid going off on tangents that do not pertain to the topic under investigation. If you believe understanding the research problem requires additional information, consider adding it as background information after the introduction. Otherwise, concentrate on the task at hand.
• Strategic Decision-making. Literature review searching requires meticulous and clear thinking about what sources to include or exclude. Part of why scholars conduct a review of the literature is to define the scope of their research based on the sources they have cited. The literature review section is not just a summary of studies related to the topic; the search process also helps the reader ascertain the choices made about which sources you believe are most relevant to understanding the topic.
• Organized Outcomes. Searching for prior research in preparation for writing the literature review section should not be approached with the intention of simply summarizing a list of studies you found. Consider how the results from searching should be organized into conceptual categories [themes] that reflect how to understand the significance of topic. This means approaching the search process with the intention of synthesizing what you discover in ways that explain all aspects of the research problem.

"Choosing a Topic." Online Writing Lab, Purdue University; Currie, Lea, Frances Devlin, Judith Emde, and Kathryn Graves. "Undergraduate Search Strategies and Evaluation Criteria: Searching for Credible Sources." New Library World 111 (2010): 113-124; Joo, Soohyung, and Namjoo Choi. "Factors Affecting Undergraduates’ Selection of Online Library Resources in Academic Tasks: Usefulness, Ease-of-use, Resource Quality, and Individual Differences." Library Hi Tech 33 (2015): 272-291; "Literature Reviews." The Writing Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Porter, Brandi. "Millennial Undergraduate Research Strategies in Web and Library Information Retrieval Systems." Journal of Web Librarianship 5 (2011): 267-285.

Effective Search Strategies for Literature Reviews

A search strategy refers to the deliberate, systematic process for locating and retrieving sources of information that support the rationale for studying the research problem. It enables you to confidently identify and use the appropriate academic resources and databases [i.e., scholarly search engines] needed to locate information and then maximize their effectiveness in addressing your specific needs as a researcher.

The search process begins with identifying concepts related to the research problem and breaking them down into terms or short phrases and their synonyms. These are the "keywords" you enter into databases to search for information. Most databases include an advanced search option with tools that help you further refine the discovery process and retrieve the most relevant results. An effective search strategy also encourages you to search for additional sources pertaining to your initial results. This includes thinking about new or related terms that can be used to expand, narrow, or further clarify the search for information, help determine important relationships among the works of various scholars [i.e., what are the approaches they have taken to study the topic], and help reveal gaps in how the research problem has been studied in the past.

In the social and behavioral sciences, these overarching principles should be applied to the literature review search process:

1. Visualization -- this principle refers to approaching the search process as if you're climbing a mountain of literature. Begin with a broad, multidisciplinary scan of prior research. This builds a base of sources that helps you understand the ways in which scholars have examined the topic. Then, further refine your search as you climb up the mountain to include additional, discipline-specific sources that elucidate key aspects of the research problem. The peak of the mountain represents the most relevant sources you selected during the climb that will allow you to write a thorough literature review section of your paper.
2. Interdisciplinarity -- this principle refers to conducting searches that simultaneously incorporate studies published in multiple academic disciplines. This approach involves searching beyond siloed disciplinary thinking by integrating knowledge and reasoned perspectives from different fields of study, thereby, providing a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the research problem, its significance, and the context in which it exists.
3. Perspective-taking – this principle refers to conducting searches with the intention of determining whether the thoughts, behaviors, and experiences of all groups of people or organizational entities impacted by the research problem have been adequately considered in prior research. It involves introspectively contemplating how others may perceive the research problem in order to reveal if their inclusion in your study could contribute to understanding the topic in new or innovative ways, or, if their exclusion reveals a key gap in the literature.

Practical Strategies for Searching Databases

• Using Controlled Vocabulary. Most scholarly databases organize their content based on “controlled vocabulary” [sometimes referred to as either subject headings, descriptors, or index terms]. These are standardized terms used to describe specific ideas, concepts, and phenomena that have become codified within particular areas of scholarship. Take note of the standardized language used to describe the content of studies found in your initial search results. Because these terms are standardized, you can apply them throughout the search process to ensure consistent retrieval of relevant sources.
• Using Boolean Operators. This refers to a strategy of searching that utilizes AND, OR, and NOT to combine, broaden, or exclude terms. The advanced search mode of many databases present multiple search boxes where you enter terms and can specify the Boolean operators you want to apply to your search [you can also add search boxes, if needed]. Boolean operators offer a way to be very precise in how you search for information [e.g., climate change AND sustainability; climate change OR global warming AND sustainability; climate change OR global warming NOT carbon dioxide].
• Using Search Filters. Filters refer to options that allow you to limit your search results in specific ways, further refining the parameters of the sources that have been retrieved. Common search filters include limiting results by material type [e.g., only scholarly journal articles], by specific dates or periods of time that sources have been published, by the language sources are written in, by geographic area, or by a specific author.
• Using Quotation Marks. Some databases make it easy to refine search results by specifying what words should be grouped together as a phrase using quotation marks. For example, entering rational choice theory without using quotes would bring up any sources that include the words, rational, choice, and theory in its contents; some items would be about rational choice theory, but most would not. By putting the phrase "rational choice theory" in quotes, you ensure results include just that phrase in the title, abstract, and/or full-text of the study.
• Using Truncation Symbols. Truncation refers to keyboard symbols used either in or after words. They can help broaden your search to include various word endings [e.g., politic* would bring up items that also include the words politics and politically] or to substitute one letter in a word to account for more than one spelling [e.g., coloni?e would include results for both colonize and colonise]. Truncation symbols vary among databases, but the most common symbols are *, ?, !, or # and their use are usually defined within the advanced search option of a database.
• Using proximity.  

Search Process Resources

I.  Library Catalog

Going back to the concept of approaching the search process as being analogous to climbing a mountain of literature, a good starting point is using the Libraries’ catalog to seek information from print or digital books, U.S. government documents, research reports, and audio-visual sources. Writing an effective literature review requires that you explain what scholars have already said about the research problem. For example, books found in the library catalog can provide essential background information about the topic and, by perusing the table of contents or reading the introduction, obtain an understanding about how the topic has been studied in the past. This helps refine your topic and lays a foundation for considering how to approach searching for more specific information about the research problem.

II.  Multidisciplinary Database Searching

The USC Libraries subscribe to several databases that provide simultaneous searching of research published across a wide variety of disciplines. These databases facilitate understanding the topic from multiple disciplinary perspectives, thereby, improving the opportunity to locate studies that offer a unique or innovative way to contemplate the research problem.

The most comprehensive and user-friendly multidisciplinary database that the Libraries subscribe to is ProQuest Multiple. Among the advantages to using the ProQuest to begin building your review of the literature is that: 1) the contents are updated daily, 2) it covers the core scholarly journals of dozens of disciplines, 3) about eighty percent of the content is available full-text, and 4) ProQuest features an easy-to-use citation formatting function.

ProQuest Search Steps

• After entering the database, click on the Advanced Search option above the single search box.
  • Use this option to display multiple search boxes; this allows you to be more precise in how you formulate the search.
• Enter keywords or short phrases related to the research problem in one or more of the search boxes.
  • This approach helps ensure a search will reprieve the most relevant results.
  • Database defaults to using the Boolean operator AND between each search box but, if desired, you can change the links among the boxes using OR  or NOT.
  • You can add more search boxes, but keep in mind that adding more boxes may unintentionally exclude studies that could have been useful, so start with a broad search before adding any additional boxes.
• Click on the Scholarly Journals link in the left-hand column under Source Type.
  • In most cases, you should limit results to academic, peer-reviewed journal articles, though the database also allows you to limit your results to just newspaper articles, e-books, dissertations, magazines, historical periodicals‎, archival materials‎, or blogs, podcasts, and websites.
• Click on the "Quick look" pop-up or Abstracts/detail link under the scholarly articles that most closely relate to the research problem
  • The abstracts and details link will display a summary of the article’s contents and the subject terms [i.e., controlled vocabulary] used to describe the content of the article. Use are these standardized terms you can use to help narrow, broaden, or clarify your search strategy.
• Useful tools for managing your search  results.
  • To the right of each item, there is a quotation mark link that you can use to automatically format a citation to the article. This can be copied and pasted into the list of references in your paper.
  • Use the the envelope symbol after checking the box next to the item on the left to email the item and/or the search you performed.
  • The file icon link allows you to upload records into your My Research account where you can save documents, archive prior searches, set up search alerts and RSS feeds, and customize your search interface and settings.

NOTE:  These general search steps, including using the advanced search option, can be applied to most of the databases available from the USC Libraries. Many databases of these also have the equivalent of the My Research personal account function.

Other Multidisciplinary Databases

• JSTOR -- a multidisciplinary archive of scholarly journal articles [as well as books and other materials] covering most major disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Useful for identifying historical research on a topic; it does not cover current research studies published within the last three to five years, however, all content is available full-text.
• OmniFile Full Text -- a database of essential publications for research across many disciplines, including applied sciences, art, education, ethnic studies, humanities, law, social sciences, technology, and women's studies. It includes the full text of articles from more than 3,000 journals dating back to 1994, with additional coverage since 1982.
• Policy Commons -- provides access to research from the world’s leading policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, and intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. The database provides advanced searching across millions of pages of books, articles, working papers, reports, policy briefs, data sets, tables, charts, media, case studies, and statistical publications, including archived reports from more than 200 defunct research centers. Coverage is international in scope.

III.  Discipline-specific Database Searching

The USC Libraries subscribe to more than 900 specialized databases that provide access to research literature published in almost every area of study taught at USC. Discipline-specific databases supplement what can be discovered in multidisciplinary databases by offering a deeper and more precise and critical exploration of the scholarly literature on a topic.

There are two main ways to locate discipline-specific databases:

1. A-Z List of Databases. The alphabetical list of databases allows you to filter resources by subject area and database type. Using this tool can help you identify the appropriate databases to build your review of the literature and increase the likelihood that you will find relevant, discipline-specific sources.
2. Research Guides. Librarians at USC have authored numerous online guides that list and describe key databases that support finding research studies published within specific disciplines. Most of these subject guides also include links to scholarly web sites, statistical sources, digital archives, and other types of research resources vetted by the librarian.

IV.  Perspective-taking

There are a variety of databases that provide access to studies that can help you understand and contemplate the implications of a research problem as seen through the eyes of others. The databases listed below can be used to contextualize your literature review search based on whether these groups have been adequately considered in prior studies.

• AgeLine -- focuses exclusively on issues of aging among people aged 50 years and older from individual, national, and global perspectives. Contents cover the social, psychological, economic, policy, and health care aspects of aging derived from journal articles, books and book chapters, research reports, and PhD dissertations.
• Chicano Database -- focuses on the Mexican-American and Chicano experience, and the broader Latino experience of Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Central American immigrants since 1992. Covers Chicano/a art, education, folklore, health. history, labor, language and literature, music, politics, public policy, religion, sociology, and women's studies.
• Child Development and Adolescent Studies -- provides citations to current and historical social and behavioral sciences literature related to the growth and development of children and teenagers through the age of 21, including from scholarly journals, technical reports, books, book chapters, and theses and PhD dissertations.
• Ethnic NewsWatch -- comprehensive database that includes current and archival coverage of newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals from ethnic and minority presses as well as research studies written by and about minorities, indigenous groups, and underrepresented people and communities.
• Family and Society Studies Worldwide -- covers research, policy, and practice literature in family science, human development, child and family welfare, civil and legal rights, and social welfare from a wide range of publications in the social and behavioral sciences.
• LGBTQ+ Life -- comprehensive resource to the world's literature regarding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and transsexual issues. Coverage includes traditional academic, lifestyle, and regional publications, as well as non-periodical content, such as, non-fiction books, bibliographies, and PhD dissertations.
• Women’s Studies International -- an interdisciplinary database that covers issues in women's studies including feminist theory and history and research presenting gendered perspectives concerning problems in sociology, history, political science and economy, public policy, international relations, arts and humanities, business and education.

NOTE:  The Libraries search engine as well as some library databases include a Saved Searches [a.k.a., My Favorites] feature that facilitates saving search queries using a link to register and create a personal account. Creating a personalized account allows you to review prior searches whenever you log into the database. This feature also helps you keep track of your search history should you want to replicate the search in another database or to re-run the search in the same database at a later date.

ANOTHER NOTE:  Many databases offer the ability to create automatic e-mail notifications or RSS feeds that notify you when any new studies matching your previous search results are added to the database. This can alert you to new articles related to a given subject area or published by a certain author. Automatic notifications can be set up to be received on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This feature is useful for keeping up-to-date with research as soon as it becomes available, thereby, eliminating the need to search a database multiple times to see if any new content has been added.

DON'T STRESS!  REACH OUT TO A LIBRARIAN

If you have applied the various literature review search strategies described above and you are still struggling to find relevant information about your topic, please ASK A LIBRARIAN. Librarians at USC stand ready to recommend the most appropriate databases to use. They can help you design effective literature review search strategies to obtain the most relevant research results. They can also assist with determining how to synthesize the research literature you find so that you can write an effective literature review section for your paper, including help with how to properly format your citations. The link above displays three ways you can contact a librarian--chat service available from 10:00am - 6:00pm, Monday through Thursday and from 12:00pm - 4:00pm on Fridays [except holidays], emailing questions to librarians at anytime, or a directory you can use to email a subject expert librarian to schedule an appointment to discuss your research project [in-person or over Zoom].

Faix, Allison. "Assisting Students to Identify Sources: An Investigation." Library Review 63 (2014): 624-636; Currie, Lea, Frances Devlin, Judith Emde, and Kathryn Graves. "Undergraduate Search Strategies and Evaluation Criteria: Searching for Credible Sources." New Library World 111 (2010): 113-124; Developing an Effective Search Strategy. Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Tech; Hoeber, Orland, and Dale Storie. "Graduate Student Search Strategies within Academic Digital Libraries." International Journal on Digital Libraries 25 (2024): 303-316; Gionfriddo, Michael R. Et al. "Back to the Basics: Guidance for Designing Good Literature Searches." Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy 20 (April 2024): 463-468; Joo, Soohyung, and Namjoo Choi. "Factors Affecting Undergraduates’ Selection of Online Library Resources in Academic Tasks: Usefulness, Ease-of-use, Resource Quality, and Individual Differences." Library Hi Tech 33 (2015): 272-291; Biddix, J. Patrick, Chung Joo Chung, and Han Woo Park. "Convenience or Credibility? A Study of College Student Online Research Behaviors." The Internet and Higher Education 14 (July 2011): 175-182; Khurshid, Zohaib et al. "Literature Search Strategies in Dental Education and Research." Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences 16 (2021): 799-806; Porter, Brandi. "Millennial Undergraduate Research Strategies in Web and Library Information Retrieval Systems." Journal of Web Librarianship 5 (2011): 267-285.

Searching Library Databases vs. Google Scholar

Library Databases -- contain searchable collections of published sources that include multiple options for limiting or clarifying search results. It is easy to determine where content has been acquired from [e.g., journals, magazines, books, etc]. Many library databases have a discipline-specific focus or cover research published about a particular region of the world or provide access to unique types of sources, such as, videos, statistical data sets, or archival materials. Searching may be difficult to understand for beginning researchers.

Google Scholar -- a multidisciplinary search engine that links to a wide variety of text-based materials, though there is no transparency concerning where content has been pulled from. Therefore, be aware that not everything it finds is actually scholarly [e.g., course syllabi]. Google Scholar is very easy to search and contains a vast amount of content. However, it only has a few advanced search options, making it difficult to limit or refine search results that can often number in the thousands.

Avdic, Anders, and Anders Eklund. "Searching Reference Databases: What Students Experience and What Teachers Believe that Students Experience." Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 42  (2010): 224-235; Google for Academic Research. University Library, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Finding Information: Google vs. Research Databases: What’s the Difference? Brown University Library; Use Google Scholar: Library Databases vs. Google Scholar. Library, Howard Community College; InfoSkills @ TiU: Google Scholar vs. Library Databases. Tilburg University Library; Karlsson, Liisa et al.. "From Novice to Expert: Information Seeking Processes of University Students and Researchers." Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 45 (2012): 577-587.

Using the "Cited By" Feature in Google Scholar

An effective way to expand any search you perform is to copy and paste into Google Scholar the title of a relevant journal article, book, or research report you find while searching a database. This strategy is called citation tracking. It provides the means for determining if anyone else has subsequently cited the item in their research by clicking on the "Cited by" link below the record. The number in the link [e.g., Cited by 145] shows how many times the item you found has been referenced by other scholars in other publications. You can also search within the publications that cite the article, book, or research report by checking the "Search within citing articles" box and adding additional terms to narrow your search within the cited by results.

Despite Google Scholar's search limitations, using the cited by feature can be an excellent way to build your search results by finding related and more recently published studies based on sources you have already discovered. This strategy also facilitates learning how and in what ways research has evolved over time or how a topic has progressed across different research practices. Note that some library databases also include a cited by feature, but they are limited to only citing other sources indexed within the database. Use Google Scholar instead because it has the most comprehensive coverage of source types [e.g., journal articles, book chapters, books, research reports, government publications, conference proceedings, etc.].

How to Use Google Scholar. Whitewater and Rock Campus Libraries, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater; Google Scholar: Using Cited By. Edmon Low Library, University of Portland; Noruzi, Alireza. “Google Scholar: The New Generation of Citation Indexes.” Libri 55 (2005): 170–180.

Document Your Searches

You may think you'll remember where you searched, what terms you used when searching, and where that one item appeared that looked really good, but you forgot to write it down. Perhaps. But to avoid the aggravation of forgetting these details while performing literature review searches, you should document the search process, not only so you remember how you searched for information and what resources you used, but also because your professor may ask you to explain how you located the materials cited in the literature review section of your paper.

When searching, keep a record of the following:

• The databases and websites that you searched.
• The keywords or phrases and any controlled vocabulary [i.e., specialized terms] you used in each database you searched.
• The search strategies you applied in each database you searched [e.g., in ProQuest, used the Boolean operators: sustainable development AND case studies AND Africa].
• Any source(s) you found while searching that may be relevant to addressing the research problem.

Searching Solutions: The Search Log. Research Guides. University of Southern California Libraries; Lefebvre C. et al. Chapter 4.5: Documenting and Reporting the Search Process. Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions, Vversion 6.5.1, 2025;; Advanced Library Search Strategies. University Library. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; PSYC5131: Meta Analysis: Theory and Practice--Developing & Documenting Your Search Strategy. Course Guide. University of Connecticut.