Hello!

I was wondering if anyone can give me tips on how I can choose which journals to hand search for my literature review. I obviously know of some but I'm worried that I will miss some important ones...

Any tips gratefully received.

A

Look at the references of the papers you have - which of those could you use?

Someone can contradict me if they like - but I don't think the search has to be exhaustive, just comprehensive.

... and if you have a comprehensive set of reviewed papers, if they are recent, then they should include references to important work.

thanks so much away.

unfortunately there's not really enough literature for a nice review, how happy i would be if there were.

the papers that make it through to quality reviewing, i will search their references and search the journal...

thanks!

you could put in a general search in your area in something like swetswise, which may bring up some titles. My area is also very sparse when it comes to actual subject-specific material and I think it came up with three atricles, but when I put in a search of a slightly more general nature it gave me some articles in journals that I hadn't even thought of looking at, but which might just have the odd thing looked at from a slightly different angle, but still possibly useful, so that might be worth a try. Or ask your academic librarian?

A116 - you could "attack" this problem in a different manner. By using the impact factor of the various journals you will find out which are the more important journals and then base your search around these (could be accused of being a bit of a cynical approach but that's the way the wheel turns). Web of Science has a good section on Impact Factors and you should be able to find some relative journals.
If you haven't done your literature review yet, it might be a good idea to mix your search strategies. Typical way is to find a few main authors and work from a selection of papers, but by and large, with no-one to show you how to search (or very rare anyways) most lit reviews are a result of trawling thro' google scholar or the other search engines