Library Guides: Working with literature: a guide for Education doctoral students: Building a better search strategy

Techniques to incorporate into your searching

This page outlines the basic keyword search techniques and more advanced options you can use to improve your searching

The core elements of a keyword search strategy

Sensitivity vs precision

Develop a search strategy that balances the need to find sufficient studies and/or concepts with the time and resources at disposal.

When putting together an exhaustive search, it is important to find a balance between being able to find everything within an electronic source and finding exactly what is desired. To be exhaustive there need to be a broad search strategy with many search terms and many different sources consulted. This will increase the number of relevant studies identified (sensitivity), but also increase the number of studies once screened turns out not to be relevant. Searches with more precision retrieves fewer irrelevant studies compared to relevant studies.

Keep a balance between (1) searching sensitively for a high proportion of total relevant as well as irrelevant items to screen, and (2) searching precisely to include a high proportion of studies to meet the inclusion criteria with the risk of losing relevant studies.

Phrases

Many databases offer the ability to search for phrases such as "parent involvement". Check if the particular database can process both truncation and phrase searches accurately within the one search statement.

Proximity

Often proximity searching is also supported (e.g. NEAR, or WITHIN) - which help to specify the relationship between two words within one search field. Employing proximity searching often results in higher sensitivity than phrase searching, but greater precision than the AND operator.

AND, OR and NOT/ AND NOT

Joining all possible keywords, controlled terms, synonyms and related terms with the OR operator, means articles retrieved contains at least ONE of these terms.

A string joined by OR can be built for each of 'population', 'condition', 'intervention', 'outcome', etc.

Each string can then be joined by the AND operator - limiting the retrieved articles to studies addressing all of those conditions. **if only ONE of those conditions are not met, the article will be excluded from the results.**

The NOT operator should be used with caution. Use of NOT could lead to inadvertently removing relevant items from the results.

Proximity operators can improve the relevance of results

Proximity operators allow you to locate a word within a defined distance from another word. This approach offers more flexibility than phrase searching, for example you could specify that the words appear within 5 words of each other. Proximity operators format requirements vary slightly between databases. Check the database help screens to find out how many words apart you can specify. N5 = within 5 words
Ebscohost databases	effective N5 teach*
Proquest databases	effective N/5 teach*
Informit databases	"effective teaching"~5
OVID databases	effective ADJ5 teach*

Using keywords vs controlled vocabulary

It is recommended that both keywords (a type of natural language) and controlled vocabulary (found in a database thesaurus or subject term list) be considered and included in a search strategy.
Don't hesitate to adjust the search strategy once the results are evaluated

Table reproduced from article by McGrath, Brown and Haifa
	Advantage	Disadvantage
Controlled vocabulary	List of subject terms may help find appropriate search terms Can provide suggested terms for narrower, broader or suggested topics Appropriate subject heading use, retrieves all items indexed under the topic	Recently coined terms and jargon often not in controlled list Controlled vocabulary may not be obvious
Keywords	Helps retrieve newly coined terms and jargon Use keyword searches first to find appropriate controlled terms	Some false hits/noise Need for the use of a variety of keywords to find all/most relevant items

Extend your skills with advanced literature search planning:

The link below takes you to a new window

This resource was created by the education team for researchers undertaking significant research projects.

Working with literature: a guide for Education doctoral students