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The 5 stages of planning a search strategy

“Without a thorough search strategy, your searching will be random and disorganized”

Helen Aveyard, Doing a literature review in health and social care

Before you start searching for information in electronic databases, it's always worth spending some time thinking about the words you will be looking for (your search terms) and how these will be combined. This process is known as devising your search strategy. You can then apply this across all of the databases you use.


Here are the steps to plan a search strategy:

Click on the step to see more