3. Choose the best publications

[Mike Dillinger, PhD]

Remember that not all of the hits that you get from PsycINFO or other sources are valuable ones.
It is not enough for an article to just have the keywords that you are looking for!

Here is a checklist to help you eliminate the uninteresting or irrelevant materials.

• i. Skip articles that you cannot read. Forget about the studies written in foreign languages.
• ii. Look only for empirical articles. You need to focus on empirical articles (i.e., the ones with new data) from peer-reviewed research journals such as Psychological Review or in the lists above. An easy way to scan for empirical articles is to check that there are numbers (i.e., data) mentioned in the abstract. You can also use the limiters (for peer-reviewed or methodology) in PsycINFO’s advanced search to weed out non-empirical articles. This will help you skip book reviews, discussion pieces, newspaper and magazine articles, teaching materials, etc. that might have some of the same keywords as your search but are not appropriate as the basis for research.
• iii. Look for the same approach or discipline as yours. Check to see that each article is using the same approach that you are (e.g., physiological, behavioral, cognitive, engineering, educational, etc.). You usually have to choose one approach and then stick with a majority of studies of the same kind in your Lit Review. One of the goals of your Lit Review is for you to show readers from a specific community (i.e., who all use the same approach) that you are well informed. For example, if you are studying reading and you are a cognitive psychologist, you will focus on other cognitive studies. Sometimes you will find work by neurologists, educators, statisticians, engineers, sociologists, and others that is also about reading, but it is based on different assumptions, has different emphases, and uses different methods from cognitive psychology.
• iv. Look for overlap with your research problem. Check to see how many components of your research problem (factors, sub-problem, materials, tasks, measures, etc.) there are in common with each article. The articles that have the most components in common with your research problem are the ones that you want to read most carefully.

In fact, when you are doing bibliographical research on your problem, it is not very likely that you will find many studies that deal with your same exact problem and have all of the same components. That is absolutely normal.

You may end up doing different searches for each factor or for each section of your Lit Review.

Read this topic next: Find relevant Bibliography.