Skip to Main Content

Literature searching

A guide to finding articles, books and other materials on your subject, and managing the useful references you find.

Why should I think about keeping up-to-date?

New books and articles are being published all the time. Your literature review should be updated if your project is researched and written over a long period of time. You can do this by:

  • setting up search alerts on databases so that you are notified when new articles matching your keywords are published
  • following key people and organisations on social media
  • browsing tables of contents of new issues of journals in your subject
  • using alerting services/newsletters from publishers

Further information, tips and examples are on our Keeping up-to-date guide: