SOC 355W Research Methods in Sociology

Use a research article's introduction and literature review to find new search terms and more useful articles.

The introduction and literature review:

• provide context for the article
• define concepts used, usually from broader to narrower (new search terms!)
• synthesize existing related research
• explain how the present study builds on existing literature to fill a gap

...all with citations to articles you can use. Follow the in text citation to the references page and search using the article title in Articles+ or Google Scholar.

Think of a single article as a link in a chain. An article's references are earlier links in the chain. Sources that cite that article are later links in the chain.

You can also think of using references this way as going backward and forward in time. A reference list always reflects scholarship created before the article was published. Tools like Google Scholar and databases' "cited by" functions lets you see how scholarship has developed after the article was published.