PS3134: Research Methods in Psychology

How do you find the most relevant/recent research on your topic and be reasonably confident you haven’t missed any important studies? You need to create a search strategy, a systematic way of locating relevant materials on your topic.

The steps below yield a big payoff in terms of searching efficiently and effectively.

1. Focus your topic: Choose something that interests you! Then identify the question you're trying to answer. For example: Do flu shots cause complications in pregnant women?

2. Select keywords and concepts for your topic. List only terms that are crucial to your topic (primarily nouns) and their synonyms: flu shots, influenza vaccines, pregnant women, pregnancy, fetus, complications, issues, pregnancy outcome, etc.

3. Write a search statement (This is what you would type in a database search box): influenza vaccines AND pregnancy complications.  Usually search terms are nouns. 

4. Run your search and evaluate the results.  Keep you searches broad when you first start searching. 

5. Revise as necessary. If you have too many hits, set (additional) filters/limits, use subject headings; for too few hits use additional synonyms or broader search terms.

It's tempting to enter search terms into the box without giving them any thought. After all, you can Google almost any topic and get some results.

• But are the results credible?
• Are they relevant?
• How do you know whether you missed an important study?

This is where databases come in. Research is most readily accessible in databases, and using subject headings can lead to more relevant results.  Most databases have a tool for finding subject headings (e.g. PsycINFO Thesaurus, MeSH in PubMed, etc.).  

Subject Headings: standardized search terms that retrieve articles about the same topic even though the articles may use different terminology or various spellings.

Keywords: when you search Google, you're using keywords - best guess search terms that might retrieve information on your topic. All of the articles that contain your term will appear without regard to context. This leads to many irrelevant results.