A review of literature is a process of evaluating the information found in the literature(past studies) related to your selected area of study. All works included in the review must be read, evaluated and analysed, but relationships between the literature must also be identified and articulated, in relation to your field of research. As a process of review of literature, a literature review report is written with the purpose to convey the reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. The literature review should provide a context for the research, justify the research, ensure the research hasn't been done before, show where the research fits into the existing body of knowledge, enable the researcher to learn from previous theory on the subject, illustrate how the subject has been studied previously, highlight flaws in previous research, outline gaps in previous research, show that the work is adding to the understanding and knowledge of the field and help refine, refocus or even change the topic. To do this process we need to go through the published articles. Finding and searching the past studies in each journal is almost a impossible task and this where academic databases play a vital role.

An Academic databases (sometimes referred to as abstracting and indexing databases) will find articles from thousands of journals. Search by your keyword to generate a list of results. Using them will save you time and effort compared to searching individual journals and will give you a comprehensive set of journal articles. I recommend you to use these academic databases rather than Search engines (Google)  or Encyclopedia (Wikipedia) because the information included in the databases is of high academic quality.

List of frequently used Multidisciplinary Academic database:

Apart from the above mentioned multidisciplinary databases there are several specific database for specific disciplines and its branches.

If you need any help or clarifications feel free to drop your queries at comments.