Business Literature Search Guide: Literature search

Peer-review (quality control) is used in the academic world to ensure the quality of the research production, e.g. a scientific article. Peer review is typically carried out by colleagues within the same research field prior to inclusion in a journal or similar.

You can limit your search to peer-reviewed articles in, for example, the Business Source Complete database.

The purpose of a block search is to conduct a comprehensive search that finds as many relevant documents on the topic as possible (see the video below).

1. First, you analyze your topic and identify its central concepts - each concept represents a block.
2. Next, you find terms that represent each block.
3. The terms within each block are combined using the OR operator.
4. Then, you combine the blocks using the AND operator.
5. Search 
6. Evaluate the search results and revise if necessary.

Source:Sådan søger du videnskabelig litteratur af Jeppe Nicolaisen, p. 153

Boolean operators

In a block search you will combine your keywords by using Boolean logic. Boolean logic consists of 3 operators, AND, OR, and NOT. 

The most often used operators are AND and OR. Combine your keywords with AND, when you want to narrow down your search result. 
If you combine with OR, then you will expand it. 

It is often the case that the databases automatically combines the entered words with AND.

Phrase search

Search for words that appear in a context or in a specific order with quotation marks around the words e.g. "artificial intelligence". Then you will only get results where the words are just next to each other. You can also use phrase searches when searching for a specific title, e.g. "The ugly duckling".

Truncation

A truncation is performed by placing an asterisk * as an exchange for e.g. an ending of a word. If you are searching for e.g. leader*, you will receive a search result with both leader, leaders and leadership.

PRISMA Flow Diagram helps you map the number of identified, included, and excluded records, as well as the reasons for exclusions in a review.

PRISMA-S includes a checklist for reporting literature search with 16 items.