The knowledge and effective use of these available resources can greatly improve the efficiency and quality of literature reviews. Issues in Doing Literature Reviews Recall and precision are key issues in the literature search process. Recall refers to the percentage of all relevant sources that are actually located during the literature search, while precision is the percentage of all located sources that are actually relevant to the researcher s interests. As expected, recall and precision are often inversely related. The following paragraphs provide a brief description of each technique along with a representative source for each technique.
Consultation involves locating references by corresponding with others.
It tends to be a low-recall strategy, since it is limited by the knowledge, memory, and biases of correspondents. Conversely, it is generally high in precision because the references provided have been pre-screened for relevance. A major advantage of consultation is the ability to locate unpublished materials. Subject indexes . In addition, many databases offer search-refining capabilities such as the ability to combine multiple searches and limit searches by type of publication, year, language, or other characteristics.