Search across guide titles, topics, keywords, and content throughout the Researcher's Field Guide.
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Strict search criteria can make results look cleaner while quietly excluding studies that matter. The goal is not to remove every irrelevant record but to retrieve the relevant evidence with acceptable screening burden.
Read Guide →A broad search can protect against missing evidence, but breadth has costs. When the search or underlying eligibility criteria become too broad, irrelevant retrieval and substantive heterogeneity can make the literature difficult to screen, compare, and interpret.
Read Guide →A search strategy should usually be tested before it becomes your final search. Piloting can reveal missing terminology, faulty Boolean logic, excessive noise, and known relevant studies that your planned strategy fails to retrieve.
Read Guide →A known relevant paper can act as a diagnostic test for your planned search. If the strategy cannot retrieve a study that should fit its scope, investigate why before assuming the search is ready.
Read Guide →A missing key paper is a warning worth investigating, not automatic proof that your search has failed. Diagnose whether the problem comes from database coverage, terminology, indexing, search logic, or an unnecessary restriction before changing the strategy.
Read Guide →Google Scholar and Google search different information environments. Learn when Google Scholar is better for scholarly literature, when regular Google is more useful, and how researchers can use both strategically.
Read Guide →Google Scholar is an excellent scholarly discovery tool, but whether it is enough depends on the purpose and rigor of your literature review. Learn when to use it alone, when to supplement it, and why search coverage matters more than the number of databases searched.
Read Guide →Your university library's main search box can be an excellent starting point for finding books, articles, and other resources, but it does not necessarily search everything your library provides. Learn when discovery systems are useful and when individual databases are the better choice.
Read Guide →Preprint servers can reveal recent research before journal publication, but preprints have usually not completed formal peer review. Learn when searching them adds value and how to use their findings responsibly.
Read Guide →Theses and dissertations can reveal detailed studies, emerging research, negative or unpublished findings, and extensive references that journal databases may miss. Whether you should search them depends on your research question and review methodology.
Read Guide →Conference proceedings can contain important research that journal searches miss, particularly in conference-oriented and rapidly developing fields. Learn when to search them, where to look, and how to handle conference papers and abstracts responsibly.
Read Guide →Important evidence does not always appear in academic journals. Learn where to find government reports, policy documents, official statistics, technical reports, and other nonjournal research and how to evaluate what you find.
Read Guide →The most important database is not necessarily the largest or most prestigious one. It is the database whose coverage, indexing, document types, and disciplinary focus best match the evidence your research question requires.
Read Guide →Discipline-specific repositories can reveal research outputs that conventional bibliographic databases do not capture, capture later, or represent differently. Their usefulness depends on what the repository contains and whether those materials matter to your research question.
Read Guide →Trial registries can reveal ongoing, completed, terminated, and sometimes unpublished trials that journal databases may not identify. They are particularly important for systematic reviews of interventions and questions involving clinical trials.
Read Guide →Registration extends beyond conventional clinical trials. Depending on your field and question, other study registries and preregistration systems may reveal planned, ongoing, completed, or otherwise difficult-to-discover research.
Read Guide →Institutional repositories can expose theses, manuscripts, conference materials, reports, and other research outputs produced by a particular university or organization. They are especially useful when institutional affiliation or locally deposited material matters to your search.
Read Guide →When a concept has no agreed name, searching for one preferred term can miss substantial parts of the literature. Build the concept from the language authors and databases actually use, then test those terms against known relevant records.
Read Guide →Different disciplines may study closely related phenomena using different terminology, theories, and indexing systems. A cross-disciplinary search should therefore identify the vocabulary used within each relevant field rather than translating one field's terminology unchanged into every database.
Read Guide →Older studies may describe populations using terminology that researchers would not choose today. A comprehensive historical search may therefore need those terms for retrieval while clearly distinguishing their search function from appropriate current language.
Read Guide →Terms can look similar, share an abbreviation, or occur in the same literature without representing the same concept. Check definitions, context, operationalization, and actual retrieval before combining apparently similar terms in a search.
Read Guide →Relevant studies may identify the same drug or product by a generic name, brand name, development code, or another identifier. For sensitive retrieval, search the names that actually appear in eligible literature rather than assuming one naming system will capture them all.
Read Guide →Relevant older records may use names that have since been replaced, renamed, reclassified, rebranded, or abandoned. Historical names should be included when they provide a plausible route to evidence within the time period and scope of your search.
Read Guide →Emerging topics rarely arrive with stable vocabulary. Build the search iteratively from seed records, competing labels, descriptive phrases, early terminology, and developing subject headings, then expect to revise it as the field matures.
Read Guide →There is no correct number of synonyms for a search concept. You probably have enough when the important ways of expressing the concept are represented, known relevant records are retrieved, and additional terms produce little meaningful new retrieval.
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