Finding Literature for Your Thesis in Nepal: NepJOL, Google Scholar and Beyond

15 July 2026 · 6 min read

Every supervisor in Nepal has heard it: "I couldn't find literature on this topic in the Nepali context." Usually the literature exists — it's just not on the first page of Google. Knowing the three or four right places to search transforms a thin literature review into a solid one.

Start with NepJOL

Nepal Journals Online (nepjol.info) hosts hundreds of Nepali academic journals — management, economics, education, health, engineering — with most articles free to download. For any thesis needing Nepali context, search NepJOL first: finding three local studies on your topic instantly strengthens both your literature review and your gap argument ("studies exist for commercial banks, none for microfinance").

Use Google Scholar properly

Search with quoted phrases plus context: "service quality" "customer satisfaction" Nepal banking.
Use 'Cited by' on any good paper to find newer research building on it, and its reference list for the foundations.
Filter by year to catch the recent studies examiners expect (last 5–10 years).
Create an alert for your exact topic — new papers arrive by email while you write.

Getting past paywalls, legally

Click 'All versions' on Google Scholar — an open PDF often hides behind one of them. Check the authors' ResearchGate or university pages, where many share their own papers. And emailing an author directly to request a copy works far more often than students expect; researchers like being read. Your university library may also have database access students never ask about — ask.

Don't ignore grey literature

For Nepali topics, some of the best data isn't in journals: NRB reports and working papers, CBS statistics, ministry publications, World Bank and ADB country studies. These are citable, credible and often more current than journal articles — perfect for your background chapter and for grounding your problem statement in real numbers.

Organise as you collect

Save every source into Zotero (free) the moment you find it, with a one-line note on why it matters. Fifty sources organised as you go is a literature review half-written; fifty PDFs in a downloads folder is a crisis in month four.

Struggling to build the literature base for your topic? Assignment Nepal's researchers can help you map the relevant Nepali and international sources — message us on WhatsApp at +977 9768768340.