Search Strategies

Snowballing

If you have found one journal article, you can consult the article's references to find out what sources were used. This will help you to find earlier literature.

Snowballing Procedure (source: C. Wohlin 2014)

• Guidelines for Snowballing
  by C. Wohlin (2014)

Cited reference search

Cited reference search is snowballing forward. Look at sources where the article is cited. This will give you more up-to-date literature on your topic. It is easy to search for references in Web of Science or Google Scholar.

Searching relevant journals

If you find many relevant articles in certain journals, it may be useful to search these journals to find other relevant articles. Find out more about journal search.

Author searching

If many key articles you have located are written by the same author, you could carry out an author search. You can search by author in almost all databases or search engines. Make sure you search for all name variants.

Block search

You can organize your search terms into thematic groups (blocks), covering the various aspects within your topic. It will help to create an overview of potential search terms. 

• Formulate a literature search question

• Identify the key elements

• Define your blocks (key elements)

• Collect search terms for each block

• Set up a search string

The search terms within a block are combined with OR, the blocks are combined with an AND operator.