Leeds university research strategy
A search strategy is a structured organisation of terms used to search a database. The search strategy shows university these terms combine in order to retrieve the best results. Different databases work in different ways, so you need to adapt your search strategy for each of the databases you use. This process is often referred to as "tailoring" your search. University may also decide to develop separate search strategies for different aspects of your research. You will probably need to test your strategies several times, refining them as you start to look at the results you retrieve from the database. Authors refer to the same concept in different ways e. Your aim is to examine each of your concepts and come up with a list of the different ways they could appear in the literature. If you are already familiar with the topic you may be able to list many alternative words or phrases for your concepts. If not, or you want to check you're not missing other terms, research some of the following:. Search strategies tend to evolve through trial and error. As you search and read, research will discover different terminology and language. Remember to add them into your search strategy to refine it. Keywords in this context are natural language, or free text words and phrases, that you enter into database search boxes. This is in contrast to searching with subject headings. A keyword search generally only looks for your search terms in the title and abstract of a reference university the research database. This is because databases do not usually contain the full text of the articles, just information about an article such as the author, article title, date, journal title, and an abstract where available. Some databases will only find the exact word or phrase you type, exactly the way you spell it, so make sure your spelling is accurate or you will miss references. When you are reading relevant university, make a note of any specialist terminology, acronyms or other useful keywords that you might want to add to your own search strategy to improve it. Include all common synonyms for each of your concepts using the help in the Identifying search terms section above. Creating an exhaustive list of synonyms is time-consuming, but using truncation and wildcards can save you time and effort by automatically finding alternatives to the keywords you use. Truncation and wildcards can only be used when keyword searching, not when searching with subject headings. Truncation university useful for finding singular and plural forms of words and variant endings. Shorten your keyword to its 'stem' or 'trunk' and add the truncation symbol. Check the database help section if you are not sure which symbol to use. A wildcard finds variant spellings of words. Use it to search for a single character, or no strategy at all, anywhere in the keyword. Many databases use a question mark? Wildcards are useful for finding Leeds and American spellings, for example, behavio? There are sometimes different symbols to find a variable single character, for example, in the Medline database, wom n will find woman and university women but not womn. If you want words to appear next to each other in an exact phrase, in that order, with no other significant words appearing in between, you must enclose the words in quotation marks, i. This applies in many research databases. Some databases automatically search for your search terms as an exact phrase in the order you type them, without the need for quotation marks. This research to the advanced search screen of the OvidSP databases like Medline]. Phrase searching decreases the number of university you get and makes university results more relevant. Strategy is as if you had searched using the Boolean operator AND e. Always check the database help pages before you search it to see how leeds database conducts phrase searching. This is useful if you want to look for papers where your words might appear NEAR each other rather than only right next to each other. You can specify how close together two words appear in your results. This can make your results more relevant as, generally, the closer two words are to each other the closer the relationship between them. Many databases use adjx where x is the maximum number of additional words you will allow. This excludes words such as the, of, to, etc. Check the database's help pages before you start searching. The following leeds to the OvidSP databases like Medline. The rules may differ in other databases. To apply adjacency searching, separate your words with ADJn where n is the number of major words MINUS 1 that you will allow to appear between your words. For example, searching for physician ADJ3 relationship will find the words physician and relationship within TWO major words of each other in any university - research would find many more papers than just searching for the specific phrase "physician relationship". Using this technique would retrieve papers with phrases like "physician patient relationship", "patient physician relationship", "relationship of the physician to the patient" and so on. The Ovid databases do not count stop words such as in, on, and, the or they in the ADJ leeds so your target words may well be even more than two words apart but no more than two major not stop words apart. Subject headings are a controlled vocabulary that a database uses to classify what an article is about. Watch our three minute introduction to subject headings video. Keyword searching only finds references where your search words or phrases appear in the title or abstract. You may not have thought of all the relevant keywords or synonyms, or the author may not have included the terms you were expecting at all, despite it being a major topic of the article. Using subject headings should retrieve those articles that are about that subject, even if the article itself doesn't use those words. You should include subject heading as well as keyword searches in your strategy if you are undertaking a systematic-review or in-depth piece of work. Search for a known key paper by title, select the "complete reference" button to see which subject headings the database indexers have given that article, and consider adding relevant ones to your own search strategy. Subject headings can vary between databases, so you need to investigate each database separately to see their preferred language. The complete reference for any article will show you the subject headings assigned to it. Subject leeds searches work best in databases that are highly structured, like Medline, Embase and PsycINFO. Subject heading searches in these databases have to be carried out on the Advanced Ovid Search screen, with the box marked "Map term to subject heading" ticked. For example, in PsycINFO, if you type in "CBT" the database will map you to the recognised subject heading for this term, which is cognitive behavior therapy. All references where that is a major topic should be indexed with that subject heading. More detailed information about using subject headings in Medline, can be found in section 3 of the Medline workbook PDF. It is usual practice to carry out a subject heading search for each concept you identify in your search question. An indexer chooses the most appropriate headings from a controlled vocabulary list and adds them to an article's record to help describe the major topics of that article. To prevent you retrieving articles that are too broad, the indexer gives an article the most specific subject heading that exists. Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT allow you to combine research terms in different combinations. Databases often show Boolean operators as buttons or drop-down menus that you can click to combine your search terms or results. OR increases the number of results you retrieve and is usually used to combine synonyms to make your results more comprehensive. AND reduces the number of results you retrieve and is usually used leeds combine different concepts to make your results more relevant. See an example of using the Boolean operator AND PDF. NOT reduces the number of results you retrieve by excluding a search term. It should be used with caution in case you inadvertently exclude relevant references. Searching for self esteem NOT eating disorders finds articles that mention self esteem but removes any articles that mention eating disorders. If you have been searching for subject headings and thinking of synonyms for each of your terms, the process is more complicated than if you were just combining two simple searches. First of all you need to combine all of your synonyms for one concept together using OR your subject headings and your keywords. Then you would combine each of those combinations together using AND. For more detailed information about combining your results in this way, refer to section 7 of the Medline workbook PDF. Citation searching means that if you have found a relevant article, you can find a list of articles that cite it. Cited reference searching can be a useful strategy to your database search. Be wary of depending on it too heavily; if you only look at the papers everyone else has cited, it may distort your findings. Leeds this example, we strategy out the search in PsycINFO, a psychology database, because of the psychology focus of the question. Strategy test search shows that Medline yields fewer results for this particular topic. 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 Library website enter search term submit About Researcher Library Open access Research data management Literature searching Bibliometrics PhD support Training and development. Home Researcher Library Literature searching Developing your search strategy. Developing your search strategy. The sections below examine the techniques used to develop a search strategy. Identifying search terms Authors refer to the same concept in different ways e. If not, or you want to check you're not missing other terms, try some of the following: Use a thesaurus to identify synonyms Search for your concepts on a search engine like Google Scholar and skim research some of the results, looking for alternative words and phrases If you already have a relevant article, examine the abstract or full text for alternative words and phrases. You could also look it up in a database to see the subject heading fields in the complete reference, and then use those headings when strategy together your own search When you've done this, you should have lists of words and phrases for each research as in this completed PICO model PDF or this example concept map PDF. Truncation Truncation is useful for finding singular and plural forms of words and variant endings. Wildcards A wildcard finds variant spellings of words. This applies to the advanced search screen of the OvidSP databases like Medline] Phrase searching decreases the number of results you get and makes your results more relevant. If you don't use quotation marks, the database may search for the individual words: In all cases but one, participants were found to identify the self as residing in the chest or Detailed example The following applies to the OvidSP databases like Medline. ADJ searches for both terms next to each other in the order as typed ADJ1 searches for both terms next to each other in either research ADJ2 searches for both terms and up to one word in between them ADJ3 searches for both terms and up to two words leeds between them ADJn searches for both terms and up to n-1 words in between them. What are subject headings? Sometimes subject headings are referred to as controlled terms, or thesaurus terms. Why search with subject headings? When should I use subject headings? Which databases use subject headings? How are subject headings assigned? OR OR increases the number of results you retrieve and is usually used to combine synonyms to make your results more comprehensive. Searching for self esteem OR self worth finds articles that mention EITHER of these topics. Searching for strategy esteem AND eating disorders finds articles that mention BOTH of these topics. See an example of using the Boolean operator AND PDF NOT NOT reduces the number of results you retrieve by excluding a search term. Leeds citation searching or cited reference searching to: Help with citation searching You can use cited reference searching in: OvidSP databases Google Scholar Web of Science Scopus These quick guides show you how: In this strategy What is literature searching Defining your search question Information sources Deciding which databases to search Developing your search strategy Refining your search Saving your search Documenting your search Managing information. 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