10. Inclusion and exclusion criteria
• Decide on the time span – for example,
are you researching a specific event in the
past or do you only want very up-to-date
information?
• Limit to Peer reviewed journal articles?
• Do you want to limit your search to a
certain geographical area or country?
11. Summary
• Planning
• Keywords and alternative search terms
• * truncation searching
• “”phrase searching
• ? Wildcard searching
• Boolean operators And and OR
• Inclusion and exclusion criteria
So, first of all defining your topic – Many students simply type their research question into Google & hope for the best but this isn’t the most effective way of searching as non relevant results will be retrieved. The first step is to identify the most important words of an assignment and as mentioned earlier this will form the basis of online keyword searching to find relevant information to help you write your assignment. A tip for identifying keywords is to summarize your question using as few words as possible
…so for example, in the assignment above, the most important keywords are food security and kenya
Once you have your keywords, its important to them think of other alternative search terms. This is an important step in the searching process and means that you will retrieve as many relevant results as possible. If you conduct a search and retrieve too few results, it could be that you are not using the most popular term. By thinking of alternative search terms you can over come this problem. In the example above, you may wish to search for food supply and food insecurity as well as food safety. Not sure what other terms you can use, talk to a colleague, look in a thesaurus or your reading list for ideas.
You may also notice that there is an asterisk after the a in Kenya. This is a technique called truncation searching where you have the base or trunk of a word, but insert an asterisk at the point where the word may change
Here are some more examples of truncation searching e.g. but placing the asterisk after the r in terror, you can search simultaneously for the word terrorism and terrorism.
Another searching technique is wildcard searching. This is useful for picking up various different spellings of words e.g. organisation which can be spelt with both an s or a z.
Something else you may wish to think about is using quotation marks around a phrase where you specifically want to find the words together – in the example above I am specifying that I want articles with the words climate change next to each other, rather than climate on one page and change somewhere else in the article.
You can use the Boolean operators AND and OR to make your search more relevant and effective. In the example here, I am searching fro articles which contain both terms water security AND sub-Saharan Africa. Articles which only mention water security or that only mention sub-Saharan Africa, will not be included in my list of results. Both concepts must be included in any results.
By joining more terms with AND, I am being quite specific about the results I wish to achieve, therefore I can use AND to narrow or reduce the number of results retrieved. Climate change
By joining more terms with AND, I am being quite specific about the results I wish to achieve, therefore I can use AND to narrow or reduce the number of results retrieved. Here I have added additional search term for Climate change. It is useful to consider additional terms if you have thousands of results to search through.
If you have the opposite problem and can’t find enough results, you may want to think of additional search terms and join them together using OR. This is why it is important to think of alternative search terms when you are planning your search strategy. The above search will retrieve articles with either the term war OR conflict but not necessarily both.
Break here?
The final thing to consider when planning your search strategy is your inclusion and exclusion criteria. Think about time period, how far back do you want to go. Do you want to limit your results to peer reviewed articles, i.e. articles that have been written by an expert researcher but then reviewed by another panel of experts for accuracy and rigour. Also, do you want to limit your results to a specific geographical location or country.
