UEA Library: Systematic Review: Research question and search techniques

Preparing the research question

When you are devising your research question you may find it useful to do the following:

Ensure your research is developing a new enquiry - read other systematic reviews
Identify a question that is focused but not too specialised. Carry out a scoping search to see if there is relevant research that you will use
Consider using a framework to put together a question for example PICO

Using Boolean operators OR & AND

The key to your search strategy is to combine terms:

Use OR to check alternative terms for the key concepts eg

adolescen* OR "young people" OR teen* OR "young adult*" OR student or "young person*"

"mental health" OR wellbeing OR well-being OR depression OR anxiety

Combine the two concepts with AND to narrow down results that ONLY have a word from both lists.

"Or is More!"

Filters

If you are searching for studies of a particular design, there are a number of filters available that have been produced to simplify the task.

King's College London has a useful guide on this, see below:

Using Filters - Searching for Systematic Reviews & Evidence Synthesis - LibGuides at King’s College London

Advanced search techniques

Techniques to refine your searching

Truncation

To find words where there are several possibilities use an asterisk * on the root of the word. This is useful for plurals, but also variations of a term.

For example:

therap* finds therapy, therapies, therapeutic, therapist, therapists

Proximity operators

This is a feature of databases which will search for words that are near each other (within n words adjacent) Check the database help for the correct term to use.

Example from Ovid Medline:

ADJ1 Next to each other, in any order ADJ2 Next to each other, in any order, up to 1 word in between
ADJ3 Next to each other, in any order, up to 2 words in between
ADJ99 Next to each other, in any order, up to 98 words in between

For example, the search physician adj5 relationship retrieves records that contain the words physician and relationship with a maximum of four words in between in either direction. This particular search retrieves records containing such phrases as physician patient relationship, patient physician relationship, or relationship between cancer patient and physician.

Subject Headings

Some databases have a defined vocabulary to describe papers. Medline uses MESH, Embase uses EMTREE and Psycinfo uses APA PsycInfo Thesaurus of Psychological Terms

Using Subject Headings alongside free text can help to expand the number of papers found in a search

Subject Headings

Extract from Demystifying the Search Button - McKeever - 2015 - Journal of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition - Wiley Online Library

The distinctive feature of a MEDLINE-indexed citation is the manual rigor under which it is cataloged and categorized. Highly skilled information technicians read each article to determine the key points as well as its smaller discussion points. These points are then manually catalogued under a series of searchable Medical Subject Headings (MeSH terms) and subheadings.⁵

The current staff that manages citations and MeSH terms at the NLM generally have a master's degree or higher in some form of biomedical field.⁶ Their collective expertise embraces a diverse range of biomedical topics. Each attends rigorous training in document analysis and cataloguing for MeSH (visible on the NLM website).⁷ They then complete an internship/apprenticeship with an indexing mentor who checks every indexed article for quality and consistency with MEDLINE cataloguing methodology.

The MeSH system is essentially a digital filing cabinet with 16 biomedical topic drawers that match to the broadest MeSH terms. These drawers are filled with a 12-tier hierarchy of folders within folders, which systematically narrow into increasingly refined topic areas; each topic area is accessible through its MeSH term. Each MeSH term comes with a selection of up to 83 possible subheadings to further refine the topic area to a specific focus of interest, such as the “adverse effects,” “economics,” “ethics,” or “methods,” associated with a specific term.⁷ This system is intricate, but all the tools necessary to simplify its navigation are available for use through PubMed.