The literature review section of a DNP project is significant both to readers and the writer. It provides readers with fundamental knowledge that is required to understand the main body of the paper. For the writer, it is a starting point of any research – it provides the necessary information to conduct the study. For a sound literature review, a substantial number of academic articles is required (Hart, 2018). Without a definitive plan on how these papers are searched and chosen, it is not possible to accomplish quality work.
My plan for searching for articles consists of four steps. In the beginning, I will start with a textbook and read about the topic my project is about. Gaining such information will allow me to create a list of keywords and items that are relevant to the area of my research. The second step is reading literature reviews that have been done on my topic. Sources used by the authors of the studies are valuable references. They may provide me with additional keywords or be used in my project as a reference. The third step is searching for articles, and there are many ways of searching for academic papers. I will use Google Scholar to find articles by topic name. The website allows users to conduct a full-text search and filter results based on the date of publication (Harzing & Alakangas, 2016). A more refined search using keywords can be done on PubMed, which a free resource for querying the MEDLINE database (Fiorini et al., 2017). To improve the accuracy and relevance of results, I will use a search query builder to indicate what exactly I am seeking.
References
- Fiorini, N., Lipman, D. J., & Lu, Z. (2017). Cutting edge: Towards PubMed 2.0. eLife, 6. doi:10.7554/eLife.28801
- Hart, C. (2018). Doing a literature review: Releasing the research imagination. Sage.
- Harzing, A. W., & Alakangas, S. (2016). Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: A longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison. Scientometrics, 106(2), 787-804.