Google Scholar

There are couple of things that we should pay attention to. First obvious question is how do i tell good article from bad? Google scholar will typically return thousands of hits and you need to be able to narrow down. First thing to do would be to adjust the query--these first hits will be those that match the query, so it really matters a great deal what your query is! So - think about it, and try many different ones.  Sometimes have to put the phrase in quotes; otherwise it matches each word separately.

Also do note number of citations: publications that are cited more are in general better, but factor in the fact that older articles will have more cites.

Especially for the best articles click "Cited by" to see who cites that article--if there is a very good article and one that you are really interested in, those that cite it, are probably worth looking at too. In general, you may want to have a look at publications that are either very close to what you are doing or are very important--typically widely cited (say hundreds of citations) or very good publication outlet, typically a good peer reviewed journal or a book from a good press.  

For many, or indeed most publications, do not read the whole thing--just skim through the abstract; sometimes skim through results and maybe conclusion--only read the very best and most relevant publications, do not waste time on irrelevant ones, it is easy to get yourself overwhelmed. This is super important! One of the key pieces of advice here. 



Organize right away!: annotated bibliography, mark up pdfs, do free writing--just dump it all right away! (organize and polish later) :)

May want to skip too complex math/stats or too complex language (especially if very advanced and/or not in your area (usually this is the case for masters (eg MPA) students)).

Note that it is easy to add the article to the references list of your paper--from the list of results in Google Scholar for each found item there are quotation marks that you can click to pop up reference in APA and other formats, and then just copy-paste to Word document


A final note on conducting lit rev: it is difficult! Perhaps contrary to an initial impression, doing a literature review is difficult! People almost always end up in copy-paste mode where they briefly summarize each research piece in a paragraph--this is wrong! again you need to synthesize/critique, add your own value added! So you may want to go through the above material more than once to have it sinked in and also look at the examples in academic/professional literature. A quick good  from RAND Center for Policing report:

“Concerns about recruiting minorities and women that dominated police recruitment discussions decades ago have now expanded to concerns that the profession is failing to market itself to a new generation of workers (COPS, 2009b). Personnel costs comprise 75 to 85 percent of police department budgets, underscoring the importance of hiring, recruiting, and selecting the best candidates, even in uncertain times (Orrick, 2008a; White and Escobar, 2008). Agencies have little guidance for recruitment strategies, so difficulties persist. Jordan et al. (2009) found that only one in five agencies had targeted recruitment strategies for women and minorities. White and Escobar (2008, p. 120) lament police agencies’ unwillingness to “sell themselves” when recruiting for diversity. As the diversity and breadth of the communities that agencies serve expands, agencies might face difficulties in recruiting officers for positions that are increasingly complex, require new competencies, or require interaction with communities whose needs they do not always know or understand (Wilson et al. 65).”

Note it's a narrative with value added more than the citations or summaries of them, it's a new narrative that synthesizes/integrates what we already know in a new way.

Some more resources, if you still need more elaboration:  
https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html  
http://mashable.com/2014/12/03/google-scholar-guide  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wncPoUS1xJw  
http://academicguides.waldenu.edu/googlescholar/searching

Doing literature only: publishing literature review paper

Maybe do content analysis or meta analysis

[*][mostly for phds] Taking advantage of advanced computational ways of doing a literature review

published research should motivate analysis/modeling!

Linking dataset to literature and finding the right variables: Can I study X with some specific dataset?

journals quality (and on publishing in journals)