Engineer's Guide to the Library

One of the best ways to find articles on a topic is to start with one good article on a topic (once you've found it), and then look at what articles it references (its citations) and what more recent articles cite it.

Most good research articles build on previous research, and will cite the research they use, typically with a brief citation in the article and a fuller bibliography at the end. When you find an article relevant to your topic, look at its citations and see which of them also seem relevant to your topic. In this way you can travel back in time from your starting article, finding relevant articles about earlier research.

Just as articles cited by your starting article are often relevant, it can also be quite useful to find articles published more recently that cite your article, allowing you to go forward in time. Of course, you can't tell from the article itself what later articles cite it, but there are several tools that allow you to do so.

The student found one useful article related to their topic titled "The Impact of Rewards and Trait Reward Responsiveness on Player Motivation," published in 2018.

Looking in the article's references, they found several more relevant articles.

They also looked up the article in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar, which listed 6, 11, and 22 more recent articles that cite the original article. Many of them weren't particularly relevant to their topic, but they did find a few more articles to check out.