What is in a Search Strategy?
Your search strategy is meant to mirror your choice in databases - trying to be as thorough as possible.
The elements of your search strategy are as follows:
- Search terms
- How you will tell the system to interpret your terms - as single words, as phrases, as subject headings, using adjacent or near searching, etc.
- How you will combine them - AND's and OR's
- How you will limit to what you want - based on available limiters and eligibility criteria
Crafting a clear but advanced search strategy is an art unto itself. You need to make sure you are building something that is broad enough to capture all of the elements of your question, but isn't including terminology that will lead or bias the findings in the literature.
Search Terms
Developing Search Terms includes considering the following areas:
|
Keywords |
Normally free-text terms/phrases that you generate on your own without using database-driven terms |
| Scientific vs. Colloquial |
There may be scientific or colloquial variations to some words. Wikipedia can be great for finding out what scientific names exist for common terms. e.g. water vs. H20 e.g. mosses vs. Bryophyta |
| Synonyms |
It is best to plan for all of the synonyms you can think of before you start searching. e.g. aqueduct OR ditch OR canal
Synonyms can also include historical words used for your keywords or phrases that might still come up in your results. |
| Acronyms | e.g. "soil saturation concentration" ---> Csat |
| Variant Spellings | e.g. behavioral vs. behavioural |
Search Tips
AND
- Used to limit/narrow your search
- Used in combining terms and/or phrases together to form a more sophisticated search
- e.g. fire AND Okanagan
OR
- Used to broaden your search
- Used most in combining synonyms or similar terms to ensure that one or the other is in your result
- e.g. "water scarcity" OR "water crisis" OR "water stress" OR "water depeletion"
NOT - not suggested to use
- Used to limit/narrow your search
- Used to filter out terms/phrases/subjects that are not similar to the topic of your question, thus not applicable
- NOTE: this may remove some research that is still applicable if it also discusses your topic in addition to the wrong one
- e.g. pollution NOT "climate change"
Phrase searching entails using quotation marks around any piece of your search where more than one word needs to stay together.
E.g. "water scarcity", "global warming"
Using truncation in your search can help to bring back alternative endings to your search term.
To truncate a single word you use the root of the word - adding a * at the end.
For example: pollut* ---> pollution, pollutant, pollutants, polluted
You can also include the star on the end of a phrase in most databases now - but if it isn't working the way you think it should, then spell out all phrases associated instead.
For example: "water stress*" ---> "water stress", "water stressor", "water stressors"
Once you have all of the elements of your search brainstormed, then you can start to think about putting them together into what we call a "command line search."
We use command line searches to make things easier when we are copying and pasting our searches into the databases - by pre-building them it saves time down the road.
e.g. (("water scarcity" OR "water crisis" OR "water stress*" OR "water depeletion") AND (asia OR china OR taiwan OR beijing) AND (pollut* OR smog OR "global warming" OR "climate change"))
Translating your Search
Once you have a search for a database, you'll need to translate the search over to other databases you are using.
Databases often have different limiters and may not always allow for ANDs/ORs or selecting peer-review in the same way.