How do you know if you have done enough?

This is a question that I often get from researchers who are collecting information on a topic for their literature review. In this lesson, you will be introduced to two general ideas for documenting your search.  

• Identify and document keywords related to the major concepts of your topic.
• Develop and document search strings, limits & databases  

You can save yourself quite a bit of time by first using secondary resources such as handbooks and encyclopedias to identify and focus on a topic.

It is important to remember that most scholarly articles are focusing on a very specific research question. Often it is better to understand the landscape of the topic before getting lost in the weeds. Furthermore, often articles found in scholarly handbooks and encyclopedias will help identify important research on that topic within the landscape of the issue.

This guide provides a list of scholarly handbooks that you can browse here:

• Selected handbooks: crime and law
• Selected handbooks: general deviance

This guide provides a list of scholarly encyclopedias that you can browse here:

• Selected scholarly encyclopedias
• Secondary legal resources

  Tips for search can be found on the Background Resources tab

Start Here:

There are two short videos that can provide you with some strategies for using library databases to come up with useful terms. Those are located in the tab Scholarly Articles here:

• Video: Using library databases to find scholarly literature. This video will show you how to use keyword searching to find other terms by exploring the tags used to describe the articles in the database.
• Video: Using the thesaurus feature in a library database to refine your search.  This video will demonstrate how to use a thesauri in a library database to refine your search.

Why would I want to document my search terms?

• Helps you refine your topic
• Organize your annotated bibliography
• Provide you with a foundation for developing a focused research question
• Help you communicate with other researchers your strategy (reproducibility)

What is your topic?

"A good research topic is one which you can do with the time and resources you have. Remember, time is money—your own time is a major resource. The resources you have will influence how you will do the research, but you need to have enough to do justice to the topic."  Byrne

What do we mean by concepts? Most topics that you will explore will break down into two to three major concepts or ideas. Concepts can be more of a fluid collection of ideas you have about your topic that may change as you explore the literature.  If they change they you need to record those changes.  

Keywords: are the terms that authors and indexers use to tag or describe the content of the information you discover as you explore the broader concepts.  Keywords may even assist you in redefining and focusing concepts.  These keywords could be broad or narrower terms, but all have some relationship with the concept you are exploring.

Below is a simple example of a table you could use to record this stage in managing your search.  Keep in mind that your table could have more concepts and will most likely have more than three keywords.          

Let's Explore:

Tagging or more appropriately "scholarly indexing" is a way that librarians and information specialist identify at set of search terms or keywords that can assist them as they explore concepts.  Each library database has its own unique set of subjects that indexers use to assign often available in a thesaurus or subject index.

Simply stated, scholarly indexing is a systematic way to consistently tag information in a library database so that researchers can quickly discover relationships between information and search more effectively.  

On the right is an example of an individual record in Sociological Abstracts for a journal article by Jennifer Van Hook and Jennifer Glick "Immigration and living arrangements: Moving beyond economic need versus acculturation" in the journal Demography 44(2): 225-249.  

Highlighted in red are the subject tags [United States of America; Mexico; Family; Immigration; Households] that indexers of this database have used to describe the content of this particular article written by these two scholars and demographers at Penn State.

Note: Sociological Abstracts also provides a very broad classification scheme highlighted.

Why would I want to document my search strategy?

• Allows you to track whether or not you have comprehensively covered all the potential combination of keywords.
• Helps you critically think about what the search string is actually doing and how the database is behaving with that strategy
• Allows you to craft search strings that you can use in Alert services to keep you up-to-date  
• Help you communicate with other researchers your search strategy (reproducibility)

What is a search string? 

A search string is a combination of search terms that you have used to explore an information resource.  How you combine those terms or how the information resource combines your terms is important to know.  Particularly, as we look at other ways to manage your search.  

For example, lets quickly look at the variety of ways we can combine some of the keywords for the article ""Immigration and living arrangements: Moving beyond economic need versus acculturation".  From our example above these were the keywords: United States of America; Mexico; Family; Immigration; Households 

Images taken from the Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

	Family AND Immigration	Combing terms with AND retrieves information that contains both of those terms.   Result: you are narrowing your search.
	Family OR Immigration	Combing terms with OR retrieves information that contains at least one of these terms, but not necessarily both.   Result: you are making your search broader.
	Family NOT immigration	Combing terms with NOT means that you will retrieve information that has the term family, but not those resources that have the term immigration. Result: you are limiting your search.

You can also use any combination of those operators in your search string making a very sophisticated and focused search.  For example, Immigration AND (Family OR Households).

This will retrieve information resources that have the term immigration that appear in a resource with those information sources that include (family OR households).

Let's Explore:

Now that you documented concepts and keywords related to your topic, it is equally important to document and communicate how you combined those keywords into a search strategy in a particular database.  This documentation includes (with examples):

Note: most of the necessary information can be found in search history of a database as you are exploring.  For example, you may not know that the syntax for limiting to the subject field is su(term) in sociological abstracts, because you used the drop down menus to do this.  But, the search history will provide the correct syntax that you can use to track this information.