Summary points
Download a search strategy form and use it to guide you through the following:
- Define your search question as clearly as you can before starting.
- Break your question down into topic areas.
- For each of those topic areas write down different a list of keywords and synonyms.
- Try snowballing and browsing the databases’ thesaurus to find additional subject headings.
- Decide if you can use wildcards and/or truncation.
- Think through where you can combine your search terms with the operators OR/ AND/ NOT and whether or not you could use proximity searching to optimise your search results.
- Look at the parameters available to you within each database and decide whether or not they will enable you to focus your search results further.
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