The enormous amount of published research in the health & medical sciences can feel overwhelming, so before you start typing keywords into a database, plan your search strategy first to:
- Maximise your chances of finding relevant information
- Save you time
- Ensure that your search is organised and reproducible
Formulating a search strategy involves a number of steps
- Identify the key concepts of your topic
- Work out alternative terminology for these concepts (synonyms)
- Record this terminology in a logic grid
- Adapt your basic logic grid so that it will work according to the specific rules of your chosen databases.
Reviewing your search strategy
