Health Sciences Virtual Library: Searching for Literature

Developing a Research Question

A good research question also leads to a direct answer in the form of a thesis.

• Ask open-ended “how” and “why” questions about your general topic. 

• Consider the “so what” of your topic. Why does this topic matter to you? Why should it matter to others?

Some good words and phrases to include in your research question include:

• What are…? What do…? What should…? Why…? How…?

• Effects, benefits, impact, consequences, factors

• Prevent, promote, encourage

Reflect on the questions you have considered. Identify one question you find engaging and which could be explored further through research.

How does spirituality provide support to adult cancer patients in palliative care?

Identifying Keywords or Main Concepts

Your keywords should be in the research question that you wrote above. Highlight your keywords in your question:

How does spirituality provide support to adult cancer patients in palliative care?

• spirituality
• adult
• cancer
• palliative
• support

Generally speaking, when searching literature, you are not searching the full-text article. Instead, you are searching certain citation data fields, like title, abstract, keyword, controlled vocabulary (subject headings) terms, and more. When developing a literature search, a good place to start is to identify searchable concepts of the research question, and then expand by adding other terms to describe those concepts. 

Identifying Synonyms or Related Words

Different authors may use slightly different words to describe the same idea. For example, one author may write an article on college students and religion, while another may write about university students and religion. Limiting your search to “college students” will keep you from finding articles about “university students.” Therefore, you should always consider possible synonyms for each of your concepts.

• Spirituality - religion, spiritual, faith, prayer, meditation, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.
• Cancer - oncology, neoplasm, tumor, carcinoma, etc. 
• Palliative - end of life, death, dying, terminal, hospice, etc. 
• Support - need, help, comfort, peace, assist, aid, etc.
• Age Group or Age Related Check box: Adult

Disciplinary databases often have subject headings (a set of official terms used to describe something). For example, the American Psychological Association Thesaurus is a list of subject heading terms that are assigned to items indexed in the PsycINFO database. Subject heading searching can improve the relevance of your search results since other items in the database about that same thing will have the same subject heading. 

Multidisciplinary databases like Web of Science do not have subject headings and must be searched with keywords. 

Keywords

• good initial strategy
• must perform searches with synonymous words/terms
• more likely to have irrelevant results

Subject Headings

• standardized words or phrases used to categorize literature
• relevant results much more likely
• subject headings not consistent across databases

More on Controlled vocabulary (subject headings) is a set of terminology assigned to citations to describe the content of each reference. Searching with controlled vocabulary can improve the relevancy of search results. Many databases assign controlled vocabulary terms to citations, but their naming schema is often specific to each database. For example, the controlled vocabulary system searchable via PubMed & Medline is MeSH, or Medical Subject Headings. Cinahl is indexed with Cinahl Headings. See the video below on how to search for the controlled vocabulary in Cinahl & Medline.

Note: Controlled vocabulary may be outdated, and some databases allow users to submit requests to update terminology.

Constructing Search Statements

How Boolean Operators Work

Placing the words “AND” and “OR” (also called Boolean operators) between your search concepts and synonyms can help you create a search statement that retrieves the most relevant sources.

As the diagrams illustrate, using the word “AND” reduces the number of results you get, by requiring that both terms appear in each result. Placing “OR” between search terms expands the number of results because it retrieves sources that use any of the words. Generally speaking, you should use “AND” between each of your concept terms, since you want to find books and articles that address all the aspects of your topic. You should use “OR” between synonyms, to make sure that you find closely related sources.

Searching Techniques

The organizational structure of literature searches is very important. Specifically, how terms are grouped (or nested) and combined with Boolean operators will drastically impact search results. These commands tell databases exactly how to combine terms together, and if done incorrectly or inefficiently, search results returned may be too broad or irrelevant.

For example, in Medline:

(religio* OR spiritual*) AND cancer* is a properly combined search and it produces around 40,000 results.

religio* OR spiritual* AND cancer* is not properly combined.  Databases may read it as everything about religio* OR everything about (spiritual* AND cancer*), which would produce more results than needed.

We recommend one or more of the following:

• use a separate search box for each set of synonyms
• put all your synonyms together inside a set of parentheses, then put AND between the closing parenthesis of one set and the opening parenthesis of the next set
• run each set of synonyms as a separate search, and then combine all your searches
• ask a librarian if your search produces too many or too few results

religio* or spiritual* or faith* or christian* or islam* or muslim* or jew* or judaism or pray* or meditat*

AND palliative or "end of life" or terminal* or dying or hospice or death

AND cancer* or oncolog* or neoplasm* or tumor* or malignan* or carcinoma

AND support* or need* or assist* or aid* or peace*

Age Group or Age Related Check box: All Adult

Now you will decide which databases you will use. This will depend on your topic; for instance, if you are focusing on a mental health issue, you may want to include APA PsycInfo or if you are focusing on education, you may want to include ERIC and Academic Search Premier. You can see a list of all the databases recommended on the A-Z database list. Click on the tab Journal Articles & Databases for some suggestions to get started. At a minimum, you should search in Cinahl and Medline. 

Now copy and paste your search statement into Cinahl and Medline.