The goal of your literature search should be to create an overview of the literature.
So in this lecture I want to show you how I do that.
Okay so this is google scholar.
I'm going to use Google Scholar to illustrate how I create an overview of the literature and let's say
that my topic is depression.
So I'm going to type in depression and we just said in the example that it's about a new view on depression
and let's just say that this is the cognitive view... just for this example.
We're going to search for that and now I get a couple of papers and here I always see the title,
and underneath I see the author and the Journal and the time in which it's published. And look at that,
the first title already says: "A meta analysis of the efficacy of cognitive therapy for depression."
So a meta analysis is not the same as a review but it's almost equally good. A meta analysis is when you analyze
the results of several studies together.
So I can already tell from the title that this paper is very likely to give me an overview of relevant
research on my topic.
So here's what I'm gonna do.
I can actually get a full version of the article here and I'm going to click on "download as" and then
I'm gonna download it to the desktop. Save.
Here it is.
And now instead of opening it, I will drag and drop it into Mendeley.
There we go.
Here it is.
And now I can open it in Mendeley and here it is.
Now the first thing I do is check whether Mendeley extracted all the information correctly.
So I see here for example that it extracted the title correctly and I also see that it extracted the
author correctly but it didn't catch the journal and it also got the year wrong.
And so here are a number of things that I need to correct here.
So I'm gonna do that quickly. And there it is.
Now all the information are correct and this is important because Mendeley is later gonna use this information
to construct the references.
So we need to make sure that these information are correct.
Sometimes it will get all the information correct by itself but sometimes we also need to help it out.
Then next I'm going to create a summary of that article.
So here for example it say that: "The results document a greater degree of change for cognitive therapy
compared with a waiting list or no treatment control,
pharmacotherapy, behavior therapy, and other psychotherapies.
So apparently the cognitive treatment is very effective.
So I'm just gonna write down that the cognitive treatment works very well and I'm gonna go to the article
here in my library.
I'm gonna go to copy as formatted citation and then I'm gonna put the citation underneath.
So here we go.
And there it is.
I'm gonna make sure that they are next to each other and then I will just go further and find the next
article and write down again what I learned from this article and put the reference underneath.
And if you keep doing that you should end up with a list of references and what you learned from each
reference.
And we're gonna use that in the next lecture to construct the outline of your introduction section.
All right.
That's it for this lecture.
And I see you in the next one.