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6. Example search strategy

Your research area is the medical devices industry for cardiovascular patients in Europe. You may want to start preparing your search by:

  • considering the type of material you wish to use
  • choosing the most appropriate resource(s)

Then you need to identify key terms and authors, and think of alternative terms.
Key terms: Cardiovascular, medical, devices, industry, Europe
Alternatives: cardiovascular OR cardiology OR heart
industry OR market
devices OR technology

Then combine your terms using truncation and parentheses where required:

(cardiovascular or heart)
and     (industry or market)
and     (devices or technology)
and     (Europe not US)
and     device*

Why is this time well spent?

If you don't plan your search correctly it will:    

  • take longer to execute as you will retrieve information and resources that you don't need, and you are more likely to be distracted by other interesting but irrelevant information
  • be less comprehensive, because you are unlikely to search for all the relevant synonyms, abbreviations and alternative spellings.
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PILOT by Imperial College London, modified by Marion Kelt, Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.