Determine your purpose, scope, and audience. Write a review question and set your review's criteria for the sources that are to be included.
Your review question might be broad, particularly if you are still learning about the topic. Exploratory searching helps you to map out topics and subtopics within an area of research. Then, you will be better able to scope your review.
As you explore, try a concept map to help you discover themes and connections and find a question that interests you.
Because a literature review is somewhat comprehensive, you need a specific review question to guide choices about what belongs in your review. A review question is not the same as your research question (which needs to be very specific and original) but should encompass the scholarship that lays the groundwork for your research question.
Once you have a review question, you are ready to start collecting possible citations. Discovering a gap in the literature requires persistence and systematic searching such as subject searching and citation tracing.
Subject terms describe what the content is about. Searching with subjects will retrieve fewer results than keyword searching, but they are potentially more relevant. They also bring together sources that use varying terms for the same subject. This is a more systematic way of searching than using only keywords.
Often when you find one very relevant article, you want to find citing and cited articles. This is called citation tracing, or forward and backward searching (see video).
As you search, try to select the most impactful sources by looking at factors such as:
Keep track of ALL your sources from the earliest stages, since you often won't know which ones you'll use in your final literature review. Citation management is highly recommended
Literature reviews are arranged by theme or topic, rather than listed by date or author (as in a bibliography). In your notes, document recurring themes and areas of disagreement. A synthesis matrix or synthesis table can help.