1. Reviewing the Literature
2 May 2008

2. Sources Books Journal Articles Unpublished (academic) papers
Dissertations
Internet

3. Search How do you know what is important and what is not?
Journal citation reports
ISI (Web of Science)
Google scholar
Google books

4. Literature Review by Others
Published literature reviews can help you by identifying important works and also by framing the parameters of current and past scholarship.
Textbooks
Book reviews in journals

5. Tough-to-Find Literature
Conference papers
Research centres
Dataset bibliographies
Example: ICPSR Bibliography of Data-Related Literature. More than 24,000 citations of known published and unpublished works resulting from analyses of data held in the ICPSR data archive.
Example 2: CSES bibliography

6. Browse Browse favourite journals, ie. through JSTOR
Browse through conference proceedings, ie. American Political Science Association (APSA)
Authors’ personal websites, ie. see pippanorris.com