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Now we are ready to dive into a more sophisticated search in article databases, aiming to get more relevant studies effectively. Let's first take a look at how to:
Advanced Search allows you to build a more structured search statement. This helps you find relevant results more efficiently. Many article databases, such as Web of Science or Scopus, offer the Advanced Search function.
With the multiple lines structure, you can type in keywords representing different concepts in separate lines and specify the search field for each line.
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You can also apply searching techniques, e.g. combine your search terms with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to make your search more precise. |
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In this example, we will use Web of Science to demonstrate the searching process. Web of Science is a multidisciplinary database covering over 20k peer-reviewed journals. You can apply the techniques to other article databases in your subject area as well.
From the preliminary search, you may have identified a few keywords and related terms for your research topic. Pick 2-4 core keywords that represent different concepts. The keywords are usually nouns or noun phrases.
Assume our research topic is: "The impact of COVID on mental health of University students in Hong Kong".
The keywords picked could be: COVID, mental health, University students, Hong Kong
Go to Web of Science database.
Add in more rows to include keywords representing different concents, and use AND to combine the keywords so that the search results will include all these keywords.
To make your search more precise, you may:
In our case:
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When you run this search in Web of Science, you will notice there are very few results. Here we can expand our search by adding alternative keywords. |
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Use OR to combine the alternative keywords (or synonyms) so that articles containing at least one of the keywords will be included in the results.
You may also:
In our case:
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Try this search again and see the difference. Note that we changed the last search field to "Title" so that only articles with the keywords in their title will be retrieved. This again makes our search more specific. |
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The last step is to refine your search results using filters, e.g.
You can find similar filter options in many other article databases.
Don't target for a perfect search statement on your first try! Between the steps 2 and 3, there could be many trial searches involved until you retrieve a manageable number of relevant results. You may discover new keywords or even refine your research topic during the searching process.
Read More Search Tips to learn more about Boolean Operators, Truncation, and Phrase search.
Once you have identified some key studies, you will probably want to find more similar studies. You can use citation chaining (also referred as Backward and Forward searching) to help you achieve this.
The diagram below illustrates how this works when you are trying to find similar articles of your "perfect" article ("A").
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Research is constantly building upon others’ ideas and key findings are linked between papers through citations made by authors. By tracing the development of your “perfect” article across time, you would be able to find articles ("B") that had an impact on this article and also the articles ("C") it influenced thereafter. |
It is easy to do backward searching - we just need to check the article's reference list. But how do we do forward searching and find the citing articles?
Many article databases offer citation information for the articles covered in the database. These databases are referred as citation databases. You can locate an article's citing articles by tracking terms such as "Cited by", "Times Cited", "Citing articles" or "Citing references".
Here are a few examples from commonly used citation databases:
View this sample article on Web of Science
View this sample article on Scopus
View this sample article on PubMed
View this sample article on Google Scholar
