Scholarly Business Research: Literature Review & Mapping Tools

There has been a growth in the number of services offering literature review discovery services via the web. Google Scholar which started in 2004 is the one most every knows. It is very convenient and very text based. One downside is they do not make their methodology well known.

Since February 2023 I have been looking at similar tools. Some are new and others have been around a few years. Some are run by non-profits and were created to make profit. Most of them make their discovery methodology known. This is very important so that a searcher can understand what is being searched and what is not being searched. In addition many of these will share which datasets or sources they are looking through. Many are science, technology, engineering and especially medical based datasets. This is because those bodies of scholarly literature tend to be grant and government funded and as a result the indexing is many times freely available on the web for the purpose of discovery.

With recent advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning interested parties, beyond large for profit entities like Clarivate and Elsevier, have started to create tools to facilitate the discovery of scholarly literature. Some of these new entrants are for profit but others are non-profit and committed to keeping the easy discovery of literature free and available.

Many of these new tools offer visualizations of the literature universe through mapping or bubbling around like and/or connected papers.

The list below is not an endorsement. If you are a researcher it is worth exploring and testing all tools which might help you in the discovery of scholarly articles related to your areas of interest.

Business literature does bleed into these tools so it is worth testing them out and seeing what you might find and the connections you might make.

Once you discover the existence of an article or book check back in the library databases to see if we have the full text. If you come across pre-print copies use them as an artifact to asses if you want to get the final published version. Keep in mind many pre-print articles have not gone through the peer review and final editorial process and may not be finished in vetting. Get in the habit of looking for the final versions. Also use tools like Retraction Watch to see if even final versions have been retracted by the publisher due to errors or falsehood discovered after publication.