Guides: Writing a Systematised Review in Social Sciences: Searching for Literature

When you have carried out some scoping searches, chosen your question and defined your inclusion and exclusion criteria, you are ready to start your formal searching process. You will be expected you record the search string you used to find results and the number of hits you get. It is normally custom only to include the number of hits you get overall across databases, but it’s best to record the hits for each database individually as well.

The video below shows you how to go about creating your search strategy

Step One: Choosing your key words.

Before you start searching you need to define your keywords. It’s best to write these down in a list before you start searching. If you want some suggestions, it’s a good idea to look at a database with a thesaurus such as Education Source. It will also suggest terms as you type them into the search bar. This is one of the most important bits of the search process and there are some things to consider:

Geographical terms — if you are searching for literature from a specific geographical location you may need to include the several variants of a geographical area such as: “uk OR england OR britain OR great britain OR united kingdom”

English and American spellings —this is a big issue in business. If you are using the word “organisation” make sure you pick up the American version “organization” (otherwise you may miss important literature).

Make sure you pick up on any relevant acronyms (or if you have used acronyms make sure you also include the full phrase): “SEN OR Special educational needs”

Take care with hyphenated words – are hyphens used consistently throughout literature? Or should you include separate variants?

Stage Two: Search Strings

When you have compiled a list of words, you are ready to put together a search string. You do this using Boolean operators. There are three common operators, and these are usually sufficient for effective advanced searching:

AND combines terms together: “human resource management” AND “multinational corporations” would retrieve results where both terms are included

OR broadens a search: “human resource management” OR “multinational corporations” retrieves results where at least one (or both) terms appear

NOT excludes terms: “human resource management” NOT “multinational corporations” would retrieve results that include human resource management but exclude results where both terms appear together.

More Search Tips

Most databases have an advanced search menu where you can input terms, but you can also type a freehand “command line” search in some databases (such as ProQuest).

There are a few other tips you can employ, including quotation marks, truncation and wildcards:

*Truncation – this expands a search term to include all forms of a root word e.g. Child* would retrieve Child, Childcare, Children, Childhood, Children’s, Childish etc…

*Wildcard for finding alternative spellings - behavi*r retrieves behaviour & behavior

? For finding alternative spellings - Wom?n finds woman as well as women

Quotation marks: Typing a phrase in quotation marks will search for a phrase rather than just individual words i.e. “Great fire of London"

Examples of search strings in the methodology of published reviews:

Taken from: Kilibarda, M., Andrejić, M. and Popović, V., (2020) Research in logistics service quality: A systematic literature review. Transport, 35(2) 224-235. Available from https://doi.org/10.3846/transport.2019.11388 [accessed 2nd February 2024].

Taken from: Jalal, A.M., Toso, E.A.V. and Morabito, R., (2022) Integrated approaches for logistics network planning: a systematic literature review. International Journal of Production Research, 60(18), 5697-5725. Available from https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2021.1963875 [accessed 2nd February 2024]