Resource of the Week #46: Guidance for Literature Searching

Hello again. In my blog post last weekend, I mentioned hearing a librarian talk about literature-searching strategies.

Some readers wanted to know more. So, here are some points and resources.

The librarian noted 3 strategies for searching the literature:

• building blocks: combining relevant search terms using connectors such as AND and OR
• pearl growing: finding a relevant article and then looking for articles that it cites and articles that cite it
• successive fractions: using a relatively general search term and then narrowing the search by adding more terms

(I find that often it’s helpful to use more than 1 of these strategies.)

In seeking resources on this topic, I found that these strategies seem to be fairly well known among librarians. One openly accessible resource on them is titled Search Strategies and Heuristics.

Also, many online databases offer guidance for their users. For example, Google Scholar contains a section titled Advanced Scholar Search Tips. Likewise, PubMed (for searching the biomedical literature) includes many tutorials.

When you access a bibliographic database, perhaps look for such guidance that it provides. Doing so can help in searching the literature effectively and efficiently.

Until the next post— Barbara