How to gather information
The source of information can be the internet, libraries, academic databases such as IEEE Xplore, Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, IEEE Xplore, Springer, Google Scholar, Scopus, etc. In most cases, you are going to use a combination of these sources. There is a quite lengthy book on this matter: How to Find Information: A Guide for Researchers. I highly recommend scanning through this book. At least, you should read this guide on how to search databases effectively.
How to do a literature review
Once you have retrived the relevant information on your topic. You need to do a quality literature review, which can be defiend as:
A literature review is an evaluative report of information found in the literature related to your selected area of study.-CQUniversity Library
In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. -University of Toronto
The main purpose of literature review is to gain a thorough understanding of the state-of-the-art of your chosen field and identiy one or more research gaps that you could make a contribution.
In this process, you need to:
- Identify useful materials
- Find or summarize key/valuable info
- Critically evaluate the literature you’ve found. Refer to here for more information.
- Write up a literature review report. In this report, you need to show that you can 1) critically analyse the literature, 2) synthesise (put together) the key findings and present them in a logical way, and 3) pass on the findings to your profession 1.
How to get organised
Recording keeping is vital in the whole process of your study. Being keeping a good record of articles you retrieved at the information gathering stage, your notes on a specific paper, or your study progress. Failing to do so may result in headaches and wasting of time for days or months.
In this regard, several free tools could help you out. For bibliographic reference management, I recommend Mendeley. This website and this guide are useful resources to help you get started with Mendeley.
You can also check out other tools like JabRef, EndNote (you can get a copy of this proprietary software through the library service I think), etc.