Assignment: Sharing Search Strategies

Assignment: Sharing Search Strategies
Assignment: Sharing Search Strategies
Assignment: Sharing Search Strategies
Week 4 – Assignment 1 Discussion Discuss your experience completing the rapid critical appraisal process. Was it really “rapid” or was it more of a laborious process? Did reading the abstract help you make quick decisions about including or excluding the study? What worked best for you in terms of the approach you decided to use to complete the appraisal and Evaluation Table? What didn’t work? Post any questions or concerns you may have and provide feedback and recommendations to your classmates. Working together and sharing search strategies is very helpful.
A search strategy is an organised structure of key terms used to search a database. The search strategy combines the key concepts of your search question in order to retrieve accurate results.
Your search strategy will account for all:
possible search terms
keywords and phrases
truncated and wildcard variations of search terms
subject headings (where applicable)
Each database works differently so you need to adapt your search strategy for each database. You may wish to develop a number of separate search strategies if your research covers several different areas.
It is a good idea to test your strategies and refine them after you have reviewed the search results.
How a search strategy looks in practice
Take a look at this about self-esteem.
The example shows the subject heading and keyword searches that have been carried out for each concept within our research question and how they have been combined using Boolean operators. It also shows where keyword techniques like truncation, wildcards and adjacency searching have been used.
Search strategy techniques
The next sections show some techniques you can use to develop your search strategy.
Skip straight to:
Choose search terms
Concepts can be expressed in different ways eg “self-esteem” might be referred to as “self-worth”. Your aim is to consider each of your concepts and come up with a list of the different ways they could be expressed.
To find alternative keywords or phrases for your concepts try the following:
Use a thesaurus to identify synonyms.
Search for your concepts on a search engine like Google Scholar, scanning the results for alternative words and phrases.
Examine relevant abstracts or articles for alternative words, phrases and subject headings (if the database uses subject headings).
When you’ve done this, you should have lists of words and phrases for each concept as in this or this
As you search and scan articles and abstracts, you may discover different key terms to enhance your search strategy.
Using truncation and wildcards can save you time and effort by finding alternative keywords.
Search with keywords
Keywords are free text words and phrases. Database search strategies use a combination of free text and subject headings (where applicable).
A keyword search usually looks for your search terms in the title and abstract of a reference. You may wish to search in title fields only if you want a small number of specific results.
Some databases will find the exact word or phrase, so make sure your spelling is accurate or you will miss references.
Search for the exact phrase
If you want words to appear next to each other in an exact phrase, use quotation marks, eg “self-esteem”.
Phrase searching decreases the number of results you get and makes your results more relevant. Most databases allow you to search for phrases, but check the database guide if you are unsure.
Truncation and wildcard searches
You can use truncated and wildcard searches to find variations of your search term. Truncation is useful for finding singular and plural forms of words and variant endings.
Many databases use an asterisk (*) as their truncation symbol. Check the database help section if you are not sure which symbol to use. For example, “therap*” will find therapy, therapies, therapist or therapists. A wildcard finds variant spellings of words. Use it to search for a single character, or no character.
Check the database help section to see which symbol to use as a wildcard.
Wildcards are useful for finding British and American spellings, for example: “behavio?r” in Medline will find both behaviour and behavior.
There are sometimes different symbols to find a variable single character. For example, in the Medline database, “wom#n” will find woman and also women.
Use adjacency searching for more accurate results
You can specify how close two words appear together in your search strategy. This can make your results more relevant; generally the closer two words appear to each other, the closer the relationship is between them.