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)
- Add a concept, if relevant, e.g. Australia*
Too few search results?
- Double check you used your search techniques (*, “”) and operators correctly (AND, OR)
- Explore broader topics in the literature
- Re-evaluate your topic or question
- Try citation searching to explore different terminology used in the area
Results not relevant?
- Double check your terms and concepts, consider if there are better terms or concepts you can use instead
- Using a health-specific database from the relevant Library Resource Guide
- Contacting your librarian for advice
Can't find what you need? Try citation searching
Citation searching is a process where you search for the title of an article to find citing articles and references. The benefit of this search method is finding articles not by keywords in your search, but by the relationship between papers as expert authors in their field cite other relevant studies.
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