Doing a systematic review

There are three main search operators:

• OR - for combining alternative words/synonyms for your concepts and widening your results e.g. women OR gender
• AND - for combining your concepts giving more specific results e.g. women AND africa
• NOT  - to exclude specific terms from your search - use this with caution as you might exclude relevant results accidentally!

The individual tabs in this box explain these in more detail.

Watch our video on literature searching tips and tricks

This video covers a variety of techniques for creating a comprehensive search including using 'AND' and 'OR' to build a search statement.

Sometimes your search may contain common words (i.e. development, communication) which will retrieve too many irrelevant records, even when using an 'AND' search. On many databases, including Google, to look for a specific phrase, use quotation marks:

• "agricultural development"
• "coronary heart disease"

Your search will only bring back items containing these exact phrases. 

Some databases automatically perform a phrase search if you do not use any search operators. For example, "agriculture africa" is not a phrase used in English so you may not find any items on the subject. Use AND in between your search words to avoid this.

On Scopus to search for an exact phrase use { } e.g. {agricultural development}. Using quotes on Scopus will find your words in the same field (e.g. title) but not necessarily next to one another.

To present fairer, balanced academic work, it is important to include academic literature from around the world, representing all backgrounds. However, it can be difficult to find Global South examples from within English language databases with currently more Global North examples. This tab lists alternative search terms and strategies that might help us pick out Global South material. Use the other tab in this box to try useful resources and database features.

Definitions: Global South is a term currently used to mean countries of  Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Global North is used to refer to countries of North America and Europe but also Australia and New Zealand, with stong economies and influence.

Remember to include searching tricks as used in examples below:

• "speech marks" to search for phrases
• truncate to retrieve alternate endings: Africa* retrieves Africa, African, Africaans
• Use wildcard (often ? or #, but check database Help) for alternate letter spellings or plurals.
• List alternatives in brackets with OR in between

Geographical terms

• Include individual country or regional names that might occur in reference records. 
  • For example: Africa* OR “East Africa” OR “West Africa” OR ​“sub-Saharan” OR [Individual country names]​
     
• Country grouping terms and acronyms include:
  • BRICS OR Brazil OR Russia OR India OR China OR "South Africa"
  • MENA OR "Middle East" OR "North Africa"
     
• Development-related terms and acronyms include:
  • LEDC OR "Less Economically Developed Countries"
  • LDC OR "Least developed countries"
  • LIC OR "Low Income Countries"
  • LMIC OR "Low Middle Income Countries"
  • "Medium/Low Human Development"
  • "Unicef Programme Countries"
  • Outdated terms: When searching for older material, you might include terms used historically but now thought derogatory. For instance: "developing countries" or "third world countries" (that is, neither 'Western' or 'Soviet' powers).
     
• Use 'local' place names, as used by people who live there (such as “South-East Asia”​) rather than, or maybe as well as, names allocated by people from another part of the world (such as "the Far East").
   
• Exclude country names with NOT, using brackets to ensure the correct term is excluded.
  • For example: (Africa* OR “East Africa”) NOT Kenya
     
• International terms: Only if an article is especially addressing international issues would it use words you can search for like
  • world OR "world-wide" OR international OR global
     
• If addressing an imbalance of power/privilege, articles might use terms such as:
  • “post-colonial*” OR gobali?ation [if ? is wildcard standing for s or z]
  • developing OR "less-developed" or underdeveloped

US/UK spelling and vocabulary

Be sure to incorporate in your searches different UK and American English terms and spellings, so as not to omit research from countries using one or the other language form. List alternatives with OR or insert a 'wildcard' or truncation term. Check the help on the database you are searching to find out if wildcards are supported and which symbol to use. For example:

• sidewalk OR pavement OR footpath
• organisation OR organization - an alterative search could be organi?ation  [If ? is wildcard standing for s or z]

Objective or subjective terms

Search for objective or even biased terms. For instance:

• curriculum AND (change OR reform OR fail*)

Decolonising literature searching, a detailed guide from Lancaster University Library, may provide further ideas