The first step to constructing your introduction is to search the literature. And to search the literature
you need to do three things: you to first locate relevant papers,
then you need to get them and ideally for free,
and then finally you need to scan them and decide which papers you want to use in your own paper and
which ones you don't want to use.
So let's go through these three steps.
So first of all we want to locate relevant papers.
How do we do that?
And this is one of the most tedious parts because in most cases the literature is pretty big.
And so the first recommendation I would give to you is to start by asking experts. And if you have supervisors
then I would start by asking my supervisors.
You can ask them what papers they recommend to start with.
You can also ask them what authors you should look for.
They can also help you with finding relevant keywords to search for papers yourself.
So start by asking them for whatever advice they can give you because they can make your life a lot
easier.
Another thing you can do is to use Google Scholar which is my preferred search engine to find research
papers and I'm going to show you later how Google Scholar works.
And when you use Google Scholar or just search the literature in general, don't just look for individual
papers but also try to identify who are the experts in the field which names tend to pop up very very
often.
And once you find these experts you can have a look how they write their introduction and what papers
they cite because they probably already know the literature pretty well and then via their reference
list you can find other papers to read.
It's also very often a good idea to go to their Web site because very often they have resources there,
very likely they will have an overview of their publications and that can already be helpful. But sometimes
they also like to blog or just generally help people, give an overview of the literature.
And that's something that can be very very useful.
Also aside from just focusing on experts whenever you find a paper that is very very relevant to your
research then you can use their references to find more papers that could be relevant to your research.
And then finally one advice I want to give you is that in whatever you do, try to locate review papers.
So review papers are papers that do exactly what you want, which is an overview of the literature. And
if you find a review paper that gets very close to your research topic then it can suddenly get very
easy to get an overview of the literature.
So whatever you use to find research papers look for the review papers first.
Okay so that's how you locate research papers.
Now let's talk about how you get them.