Global literature review - Google Scholar search notes

Work log from Jonah Olsen, 2018

May 1-5

I began by searching with different keywords attached to “dried fish” and “dry fish” and recording the number of results for each to get a sense of how much material was out there already.  This was done on the UMLibraries website. Seeing how many results were generated, I realized that I needed stricter criteria (outlined below).

May 6-19

I have been conducting the searches on Google Scholar using the U of M proxy.  I began by collecting all of the sources listed in the bibliography of the proposal (although a number were unavailable, which I have noted).

I have saved articles that are either very clearly focused on dried fish (particularly with some relation to the value chain) regardless of regional focus, and those providing some discussion of dried fish in one of the focus regions.  By far the most material is related to Bangladesh, but there is also a significant body of literature on India and Cambodia, followed by Myanmar (although much less on Burma).  There is very little literature on Sri Lanka that is not purely scientific. I have found that, often, the best sources are a few (sometimes 10 or more) pages in on Google.  Often “value chains” is an effective search term, yielding results from Africa and Asia and Bangladesh in particular.  I tried attaching discipline terms such as anthropology and ethnography but that led almost exclusively to archaeological research on prehistoric North America.

Based on our discussion, I have been searching the same keywords (region, value chains, etc.) but with “fermented fish”, “smoked fish”, and “cured fish” as well.  These have been yielding some results, although not as many as “Dried fish” and “dry fish”.

I have gone back to all of the previous finds and tagged them with the search terms I used to find them.  I have also added bibliographic information to the files that did not have metadata. I am now saving all of the search terms I used along the way to the files after each search.

I have also started to revise the keywords (for tagging in Zotero) so that we can have specific tags to add based on the literature I have found, which will be helpful in sorting the studies.

May 20-31

I often found the same sources using a wide range of search terms.  I continued to save them, but with the new search terms.  I then merged them so that the library did not become flooded, while still showing that the source came up with each set of search terms.

Generally, “Dried Fish” (followed by the secondary search term) produced the most results, although this is in part due to the fact that I always used it first. Despite this, “Dry Fish” frequently led me to results that I would have otherwise missed, suggesting that the two terms may not be used interchangeably in the literature.  Some search terms pointed to recurring themes, such as when the terms ‘“Dry Fish” Cambodia’ yielded a high number of results regarding gender in the fisheries.  In every case, “Fermented Fish”, Smoked Fish”, and “Cured Fish” led me to far fewer sources, although the ratio varied significantly by region.

Many sources that I have found are in the gray literature, requiring that I add the bibliographic information manually. Unfortunately, not all relevant information has been available in each case, so some citations are currently incomplete.