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Planning a systematic searchIt is important to plan a search strategy before beginning your systematic search. This will help you to decide what you want to find, keep track of your searches, ensure consistency and this will all save you time.
Planning an effective systematic and structured search involves:
The resources below can be used to help with your planning.
Before you start to do any research it is important to think about your topic. This could be a question or it could be a research area. Then, you need to think about how this question or topic will fit into a search strategy.
Look at your assignment title or topic and identify the main concepts/keywords that you want to find information on. To search effectively you need to search for the key concepts in your question using specific keywords and short phrases (rather than full sentences or questions).
For example, for the question:
The keywords and short phrases we could identify are:
For advanced searching it is necessary to conduct and plan a systematic search strategy. This will include clearly defined criteria covering what is included and excluded in the search. This could include the keywords or subject terms you will use and any limits, such as language or date range.
For Evidence Based Practice (EBP) searches, you will often be expected to break down your question into its key concepts using an EBP formula such as PICO, PIO or PEO:
There are examples of other frameworks available on the evidence based practice page.
For the example 'Does handwashing among healthcare workers reduce rates of hospital acquired infection?', the PIO breakdown might look like this:
Once you have defined your topic and identified your main concepts, the next step is to think about those main keywords in more detail. Are there other ways to say them (synonyms)? There might be lots of other ways to say your keywords or there may only be one way. Don't forget about alternative spellings (UK/US), hyphenated words and abbreviations.
Sometimes it can be difficult to think of alternative keywords for your topic. If you struggle to identify additional keywords for your search terms you could:
Finding the most effective keywords for your search usually involves some trial and error. However, you can continue to add to your list of keywords as you find out more about your topic.
Some synonyms for the initial keywords we identified for the question, 'Does handwashing among healthcare workers reduce rates of hospital acquired infection?', could include:
When you search for information, you can link your keywords together with Boolean operators. The main ones which are used in searching are: OR, AND and NOT.
OR is used in a search to broaden out the results. When you combine your keywords with OR, you will get more results, as you are saying any of the keywords can be found.
It's important to think about all the ways an author could have described a topic, in order to make sure all of the possible useful research articles come back in your search. So once you've identified the main keywords you can use OR to search for them all.
In literature searching, this helps with sensitivity, as it shows you are trying to find all of the relevant research for your topic.
For example: handwashing OR hand hygiene / teenager OR adolescent
You can use AND in a search to reduce the number of results you get. It should make the results more specific to your research topic as it ensures the results which come back contain all of keywords you have listed.
In literature searching this helps with specificity as it shows you have conducted a focussed search.
For example: handwashing AND hospital infection / teenager AND smoking
In advanced literature searching, you would first broaden out your search with OR, and then narrow it down using AND.
For example: (Handwashing OR hand hygiene) AND (hospital infection OR inpatient infection)
Using NOT in a search will exclude results from your search and will give you less results.
For example: hospital acquired infection NOT community acquired infection
Be careful when using NOT, as it might exclude something which you are actually interested in (if the keyword or phrase that you have excluded is also mentioned in research which includes the keywords that you would like to come back).
The short video below explains how to search with the Boolean operators using some example topics.
There are a number of advanced searching techniques you can use to improve the thoroughness of your searches.
The symbols used for these advanced searching techniques may change depending on which database you are searching, so make sure to check the online help in the databases, for more information.
The main advanced searching techniques used are: truncation, phrase searching and wild cards.
Truncation is also known as “stemming”. You can use it to search for a term and variant endings of that term, by substituting the letters at the end of the word for an asterisk (*). Your search then finds every word that begins with the letters you have entered.
For example, handwash* will retrieve handwash, handwashing / anxi* will retrieve anxious and anxiety
You can use double speech marks ("") when you want to find an exact phrase. This will only find documents where those words appear next to each other and in the same order.
For example, "healthcare workers” / "aerobic exercise"
You can also use truncation and phrase searching together. This can be useful when you want to use phrase searching but still pick up the various endings, including plurals.
As only the exact phrase is searched for, a search for “Health care worker” would not find the plural health care workers. To overcome this issue, you could use truncation within your phrase, “health care worker*”.
Also a search for “hand wash*” would keep your two keywords together, in the same order, as well as finding hand washing.
You can use wild cards to create searches with unknown characters or multiple spellings. The symbols which are generally used for wild cards are the question mark, the hashtag, and the asterisk.
The question mark usually matches exactly one character. For example, ne?t would find neat nest or next.
The hash tag usually matches one optional character, which can be useful for UK and US spellings. For example colo#r (colour, color) and p#ediatric (paediatric, pediatric).
As well as being used for truncation, the asterisk can sometimes be used for multiple characters within a word too. A search for ch*ter would find charter, character and chapter.
Guidance on how to use advanced searching techniques in a search, is covered in the short video below:
Scoping searches are useful as they can help you to identify what research has been undertaken on your topic of interest (and to double check that there is research out there). They can also help you to develop your keywords and inform if you need to focus, broaden or develop your question/ideas further.
Scoping searches can be basic searches in Discovery or Google Scholar, using a few keywords from your topic or question. If you also need to search for systematic reviews, to see if a review has been carried out recently, you could add the phrase "systematic review" to your search, or you could do a basic search in Cochrane Library.
The videos below show how to do a basic and advanced search in Discovery.
Subject headings (also known as subject terms) are a list of words or phrases that use controlled vocabulary to describe specific concepts. The headings are then added onto the records within the databases.
Not all databases use subject headings and the terminology used can differ for each database and platform.
CINAHL uses CINAHL Headings and Medline uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) which is the NLM (National Library of Medicine) controlled vocabulary thesaurus. Embase uses Emtree indexing which is Elsevier’s authoritative life science thesaurus.
Used in conjunction with keywords subject headings can help you retrieve all the relevant articles on a topic. They can also be helpful for searching for ambiguous concepts. For example a keyword search for running might find research on aerobic running or on the running a service. Using a subject heading would allow you to choose the correct context for a word/phrase.
Using subject headings is not compulsory and the databases that do offer this functionality differ with their vocabulary. Not all concepts in a database have a subject heading assigned to them and there can be some delay in adding the subject terms to records. Newly added references may not have subject terms assigned to them, so if you are searching with subject headings alone, those references may not come back in your search results.
If you do decide to use subject headings, it is usually best to do your searches in the databases one at a time as the indexes are different. You would then combine the headings with the other relevant keywords for the topic using the appropriate Boolean operators.
Before finalising your structured search make sure to review your search strategy using the checklist and top tips. You can also use the checklist after you have carried out a search, to further evaluate your search, if the results you are getting are not what you were hoping for.
This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Deed.
