Review your search strategy
Reviewing your search strategy can be made easier by using a checklist or guide to help you self-assess for comprehensiveness, effectiveness and errors.
- The PRESS checklist for search strategies is a structured tool that is widely used for peer review of electronic literature search strategies.
Test the search on a gold set
A systematic approach to searching requires testing the ability of your search to retrieve known articles that represent your research question. This testing process requires you to have a gold set of relevant articles that you want to see in your search results. The steps for testing on a gold set of articles is below:
- Once you have run your search strategy and have a result set, the aim is to ensure that this gold set of articles is included in the results.
- First, you need to see which gold set articles are included in the database you are using. If you are testing an Ovid Medline search strategy, the gold set you use can only contain articles that are indexed in Ovid Medline. The easiest way to check if the article is present is to do a search in the Title field to see if it is found.
- Once you have confirmed that the article is present, you need to see if the article is included in your search results. You can do this by combining your final search strategy results with the gold set article using AND.
- Do this for each article in your gold set. If an article is present in the database but not in your results, you know that the search strategy needs further refinement.
How many articles should you have in your gold set?
The more articles you have, the more evidence and confidence you will have in the strength and appropriateness of your search strategy. For example, testing on 10 articles will let you know that you are on the right track. Testing on 25 articles from a variety of sources will give you much better assurance that you are not going to miss relevant papers due to the chosen terms and parameters of your search.