Planning your database search
Don't know where to start when searching for evidence for your assessments. Planning your search is a key skill to set you up to find the best evidence available. Here we will teach you how to plan and develop great searches to help you find high quality evidence for your assessments.
Step 1: Summarise your question or topic
When summarising your research topic, consider what you need to find information about. You may have one over-arching question that covers your topic, or you may have multiple smaller topics to search.
Example research question
How do nurse-led interventions affect the quality of life in older adults with chronic illnesses?
Step 2: Identify the main concepts
The next step is to identify the main concepts of your topic. These are the different ideas or themes that make up your topic. An easy way to identify the concepts is to imagine you can only google 3 or 4 words from your topic - what would they be?
Examples of concepts include:
- Settings - aged care, community, hospital, Australia
- Health issues - diabetes, autism, delirium, physical immobility
- Interventions - online app, counselling, medication management, physical therapy, mindfulness training
- People - school-aged children, fathers, college students
- Study type - clinical trials, observational studies, or qualitative studies on patient satisfaction, or lived experiences
Activity: Identify the concepts
Activity overview
This interactive activity shows a research question where the user can click on the words that they consider to be the key concepts. Read the question below and think about which words are the key concepts. Research question What interventions increase physical activity in Australian adolescents? Activity: identify key concepts from a question Which words did you identify as the key concepts from the research question provided above? You can check the answers below. List of the highlighted key concepts interventions physical activity Australian adolescents
Step 3: Identify alternative keywords for each concept
Thinking of alternate keywords and phrases is essential for finding more literature in Library databases. Different authors use varying terminology to describe similar concepts, so brainstorming alternatives can enhance your search results.
Think about related terms, variant spelling, acronyms, abbreviations, and consider including broader and/or narrower terms.
For example:
- Synonyms and related terms: Patient care OR clinical care
- Variant spellings: Behaviour (UK) OR Behavior (US)
- Acronyms and abbreviations: ICU OR Intensive Care Unit
- Broader and narrower terms: Critical care management OR Sepsis management
Example of concepts and synonyms in a search planner
| Concept 1: Older adults |
Older adults OR elderly OR seniors OR aging OR geriatric OR senior citizens |
|---|---|
| AND | |
| Concept 2: Chronic illness |
Chronic illness OR chronic disease OR chronic condition OR long-term condition OR non-communicable disease |
| AND | |
| Concept 3: Nursing interventions |
Nursing care OR patient care OR patient education OR nursing interventions OR care management OR symptom management |
Tip
You can find additional keywords by searching your concepts one at a time in Google Scholar or Library Search. Scan the titles and abstracts to collect alternative keywords - you will notice other authors will use many different words to describe your concepts.