DBL module: assessing results

1. ASSESSING RESULTS
The quality and quantity of the sources that you
find in your search will help you decide if your
search strategy and your research topic are
appropriately defined.

2. • To judge the quality of
sources, you should look at
how well each source helps
you to answer your research
question. This is an
assessment of the relevance
of the sources. More will be
said on other aspects of
source quality later in the
decision tree.
z Scan the titles and
abstracts of the articles in
your search results to see
whether they refer to
matter that is relevant to
your topic.

3. • Consider the number of results your search
yields. What constitutes an acceptable number
of results will depend on the particular
objectives of your research, and the type of
search strategy that you use.
z In general, you want to
get a sufficient quantity of
results to support your
research topic, but not so
many that you cannot
process the results in the
time allotted for your
project.

4. • There are several strategies that you may adopt
for your search. Two of these are:
• Search for very specific aspects of the topic then
aggregate results
• Search for a broader set of results then weed out
irrelevant results z A good rule of thumb for
the second strategy is to
find somewhere between
50-100 results from a
search.
Search 1 Search 2 Search 3
Search 1
z In this first strategy, you
are looking for only a few
results from each search,
each representing a narrow
aspect of your topic.

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