Planning your database search
Planning your search is a key skill to set you up to find the best evidence available. This page will teach you how to plan and develop effective database searches to help you find high quality evidence for your assessments.
Search planner
A search planner is a useful tool to help you plan and document your search strategy.
Download the search planner and follow along with the steps in this guide to build an effective search.
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:
What interventions effectively support children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) during medical procedures in acute clinical settings?
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.
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
Look at the sentence below and click on the words that you think are the main 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.
Example research question: What interventions effectively support children diagnosed with Austism Spectrum Disorder in acute clinical settings?
Activity: Which words do you think are the key concepts in the example research question? The answers is: interventions, children, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and acute clinical settings
Identify alternative keywords for each concept
Each author often has their own way of describing your topic, using different terminology. Include a variety of keywords for each of your concepts to capture a wide range of relevant research.
Tips for brainstorming alternative keywords:
- Look at the words used by authors in any relevant articles you've already found.
- Review your work notes and course work for relevant keywords.
- Consider expanding abbreviations and acronyms, e.g. searching for Autism Spectrum Disorder as well as ASD
- Think about broader keywords to describe your topic, e.g. include general terms like older and elderly, rather than specific terms like "70 years old".
- Consider variant spellings between UK/US English, as well as differences in terminology, e.g. emergency department (ED) or emergency room (ER).
Example concepts and synonym keywords
| Concept 1 | Interventions |
Interventions OR strategies OR programs OR policies |
|---|---|---|
| AND | ||
| Concept 2 | Autism Spectrum Disorder | Autism Spectrum Disorder OR ASD OR Autistic |
| AND | ||
| Concept 3 | Children | Children OR child OR kids OR minors |
| AND | ||
| Concept 4 | Acute clinical settings | Acute clinical settings OR ward OR hospital OR emergency department OR intensive care |
We've placed OR in between each keyword so that the database will know to search all these words as alternative options.
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.