Improving your search results
The first search you run should find some academic articles useful to completing your assessment, but it will not find all of them. After running the first search it is important to skim read the academic articles that appeared in the database based on your search strategy.
Keep looking out for alternative keywords as you scan the articles in your search results to add to your search strategy. Experiment with your keywords and concepts - trying different search techniques, adding or removing concepts and testing more specific or general keywords. Always be guided by search result relevance.
Troubleshooting suggestions:
Too many search results?
- Double check you used your search techniques (*, “”) and operators correctly (AND, OR)
- Try using more specific terms
- Search abstracts (use the ‘select a field’ drop-box)
- Use some limiters (date, language)
- Adding another concept, if relevant, will narrow your search e.g. adding an Australia concept to only find Australian literature
Too few search results?
- Add more keywords to your concepts
- Double check you used your search techniques (*, “”) and operators correctly (AND, OR)
- Re-evaluate your topic or question
- Try citation searching to explore different terminology used in the area, and add these keywords to your own search
Results not relevant?
- Double check your terms and concepts, consider if there are better terms or concepts you can use instead
- Ensure you don't have too many broad/general terms across your concepts, as they may be used in other non-relevant topics
- Play with your search structure, can you narrow or combine concepts to focus your search?
Idea
Add more keywords! There's no limit to how many you can add to your concepts. It's crucial to add a wide range of search terms to cover the various terminology that other researchers might use to describe your topic.
Ask the library for help
Not having any luck with your searching? Or found a fabulous resource but can't get access to it? Get in touch with Library Chat for troubleshooting.
Only finding a couple of relevant articles? Try citation searching
Citation searching is a process where you search for the title of a relevant article in a citation database. This allows you to find additional research papers by looking at the citing articles and references of your relevant article.
Check out the video (4:58) below for an overview of citation searching
Any relevant article on your topic can be "citation searched" to find citing articles and references using Scopus or Web of Science