It’s common to revise your search strategy many times as you learn more and adjust your focus or research question.
When evaluating your search results, consider the following factors:
1. Precision: are the search results relevant to your research question? The most common situation when doing a search is that you get too many results. Information overload can be worse than finding only 10 very relevant results. There are several ways to narrow your results to improve precision:
- Include more specific search terms in your search query.
- Do a title field search. Specify that one or more of the most important search words are present in the title.
- Use filters such as subject headings to reduce the result list.
2. Recall: have you found all (or most) publications relevant to your research question? If the recall is low (you get too few results), broaden your search to better capture all relevant research.
- Try synonyms of your search terms
- Use keywords and subject headings from the relevant publications that you have found
