Before you begin searching, think about the words you need to use in your search. Spending five minutes on this at the start will save you having to re-run searches with words you've forgotten to use, and will give you a higher chance of finding relevant items. Think about...
It's also useful to keep a note of what you have searched if you are doing your research over a longer period of time - it can be frustrating running the same searches because you can't remember the terms you used previously.
This is our example topic written out as a sentence:
The role of women in agricultural development in Africa
Translate your sentence into keywords. For the example above, the keywords might be:
As most databases will search for exactly what you type in, you need to think of possible synonyms (different words with the same meaning), variant spellings and related terms to include. If you don't do this you might miss out on key articles for your research.
The following example shows how our sentence has been broken down into keywords and grouped by concept.
| Keyword | Alternatives | |
|---|---|---|
| Concept 1 | women |
woman |
| Concept 2 | agricultural development | agriculture farming |
| Concept 3 | Africa | African [individual countries in Africa] |
AI tools such as ChatGPT can help come up with a list of possible alternative words and phrases you could include in your search. You will need to check them though!
Enter the following prompt:
"I am doing a literature search on [insert your topic here]. Suggest some synonyms and alternative search words I could use to make my search more comprehensive"
ChatGPT will generate a list alternatives for each term and suggest ways of searching for those terms. You can also ask it to create a search strategy using those words and phrases - but you will need to check it has combined your words correctly. See the next section of this guide for tips on using search operators and other techniques to build your search.
You might find too many references on your topic, so think about ways you could limit your search. Most databases will allow you to limit your search in these ways: