How to find papers for an assignment or a thesis: five sources, one method
“I can’t find sources on my topic” is rarely about a shortage of sources; it is a search that is either too broad or stuck in one language. With the right five doors and a single method, the first ten papers on any assignment topic take an evening.
Five doors
- Google Scholar — the widest net, the weakest filter. The starting point; guide here.
- National repositories (DergiPark in Turkey, SciELO, HAL, and the like) — peer-reviewed work in your own language, which Google Scholar only partly indexes.
- Thesis archives — the full text of theses written before you. The reference list of a thesis on your topic is a ready-made reading list.
- Subject databases — PubMed (health), IEEE Xplore (engineering), ERIC (education), JSTOR (social sciences). Through your library; depth lives here.
- OpenAlex — an open catalogue of more than 250 million works with the citation graph and a field classification. Pofolia’s search and field pages are built on it.
One method: narrow, widen, snowball
Turn the topic into a question, write the English term for each concept (most of the literature is in English even when your assignment is not), then: (1) search the exact phrase in quotes, (2) too few results — add synonyms with OR, (3) too many — filter by year and type. If you would rather not memorise operators, Pofolia takes the search as a plain sentence, turns it into an operator query and shows you what it searched for.
Once you have one good paper, snowball: down into its references, up into the papers citing it. Pofolia’s “similar citations” suggestions do the same job — they bring up papers that cite the same work.
Screening: which ones to read
Title, abstract and the journal signal are enough to screen ten results in two minutes: quality in ten seconds, what Q1 means. For a paper you cannot access there are legal open-access routes; for an assignment the abstract and conclusion often suffice, but read the full text before you quote it.
Assignment versus thesis
An assignment is done with 5–15 sources; the goal is to frame the topic correctly. A thesis is about coverage, not count: the field’s founding papers, the last five years, and the contradicting findings, all together. That is a method of its own — the literature review.
When you cite it
For the rules of citing what you found, see the APA 7 guide. “Copy citation” on a paper page in Pofolia gives you a ready reference in APA, Harvard and Vancouver.