 Hello, I'm Lori Rossman, and today I'll be talking about search techniques. When it comes to searching the literature, there's more than one way to search. Which technique you use will likely depend on the purpose of your search and the types of resources that you are hoping to find. In this lecture, you'll learn about five common search techniques. Basic searching, buried picking, citation searching, pro-growing, and concept building, and when it's valuable to use each of these techniques. Most of you are probably very comfortable with what we like to call the basic search. You may even refer to this approach as Googling. It's when you type a few of the most important terms from your research question into a database or search engine in order to find a handful of highly relevant articles. For example, if I'm looking for a few articles on e-cigarettes and lung cancer, I can type e-cigarette and lung cancer in PubMed and look through the results until I find a few on-topic articles. Even though we call this technique a basic search, in most databases in search engines, you can still use truncation, phrase searching, and Boolean searching to make your search more effective. The basic search works well when you aren't looking to get everything that's out there, and just a few good articles or sources of information will do. You often recommend this approach when you are just starting out on finding information as it's great for helping to develop or refine your research question. Scrolling through the results that you get from a basic search can help you get a sense of what's out there on your topic. A basic search can open up a lot of additional leads. For example, a basic search in PubMed provides links to related papers. Additionally, many databases now provide hyperlinks for the authors and journals listed in each citation. You can try out these links to see if they lead you to additional articles of interest. This approach of selecting bits of information from individual references for further analysis is called berry picking. A lot of times people tell us they just found good stuff by clicking around and not really searching. But this type of picking through citations for useful bits of information is very important. For example, I've seen this approach used to identify key papers on a topic that were missed just by searching on key terms or phrases. Once you identify some key authors on a topic, you should always check to see their publication lists. The basic search is often the precursor to the citation pearl growing technique. In this technique, we start with a known relevant citation, what we call the pearls, and use them to identify relevant keywords and controlled vocabulary terms that can be used to develop a search strategy. In many cases, you will start your search with a few known relevant citations that may be your advisor or a colleague recommended, or as we mentioned, these pearls may have been identified through a basic search of the literature. The benefit of citation pearl growing is that you have a known paper you want your search to capture. You can use this known paper to test your search to make sure that it's effective. Citation pearl growing is an iterative technique. You will want to review a few new citations each time you grow your search. It's very likely that each of these perfect citations uses different terminology in the title and abstract, and is indexed with different controlled vocabulary terms. It's also a technique we use to help people identify when it's time to stop searching. When your pearl growing process no longer retrieves additional on-topic citations, this may be an indicator that you've reached an appropriate level of recall. Citation searching or snowballing is a component of berry picking. It can be used in the early stages of your search while you are scoping the literature to find highly relevant articles, or it can be used at the end of your search to make sure you didn't miss anything important. In recent years, it has emerged as a technique unto its own, as it is one of the mandatory requirements for conducting systematic reviews. Citation searching uses tools provided by databases to do something that we call forward searching and backward searching. Forward searching is a process of finding articles that cite your original article of interest. Backward searching is when you check the references of the original article of interest. Citation searching is an excellent way to find articles you may have missed. Citation analysis tools are available in many databases. Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and PubMed Central are a few examples. Here's an example of the citation links in a Scopus record. This paper has 28 references. A link to these references is located at the top of the abstract. As you can see on the top right, this paper has been cited seven times. This column on the right of the display lists the first three citing papers and a link to view the complete list. This is an expanded view of the reference list. Notice that each reference also links to its cited by papers and each of those papers has its own set of links to references and cited by papers. As you can see, the chain of links to papers may be endless. One initial citation can potentially lead you to many more relevant papers. This last technique I'm going to cover is what we call concept building. This technique is used when you need to be exhaustive and comprehensive with your search. What I mean by this is concept building is used when you want to make sure that you aren't missing key articles on your topic. For example, if you are working on a systematic or scoping review, you'll use this approach. With this style of searching, you'll break your research question into main concepts and then build a mini search for each concept. Then you'll combine these mini searches, often using the advanced features available in a database into one main search. So if I was searching for articles about the association between e-cigarette smoking and incidents of lung cancer, I'd build a mini search to capture all of the articles on e-cigarette. And then build a mini search to capture all of the articles for lung cancer. Then I'd combine these two searches to find articles that address both concepts. Using the concept building approach can be time intensive, but in the end it's actually a more efficient approach than typing in every combination of search terms you can think of to represent your topic. The basic search is a great starting point, but it's very labor intensive to develop a basic search for all of the different ways a term or concept may appear in the literature. With concept building, you create a mini search that represents all of the synonyms and related terms for each concept. In the end, you end up with one search and one set of results that represents all of the potential combinations of search terms. This is the style of searching that is expected for publication, because it's so thorough and easy to document. Others can follow your search logic and methods. So in conclusion, to search effectively and efficiently, you'll want to think carefully about the purpose of your search and the types of resources that you need. And then select a search technique that is the best match. If you need a few good articles, the basic search might be the best approach for you. In addition to the basic search, very picking and citation searching can help you discover important citations that are linked to your highly relevant papers through reference list, cited by lists, and other publications from key authors. Pearlgrowing is useful to help identify a more complete list of relevant search terms. But if you're trying to be more comprehensive and you know that you will eventually publish your results, you'll want to use concept building. This concludes our presentation on searching techniques.