Advanced Search Strategy Design for Complex Topics

Advanced Search Strategy Design for Complex Topics: Strategy Development, Text Analytics and Text Mining Training Day, University of York

This course looks at how to design complex search strategies and complements our training on advanced search techniques. As the volume of published research grows it is becoming more challenging to identify efficiently studies performed according to specific methods or relating to broad topics. As well as increasing volumes of research, many research topics are complex and challenging to capture in search strategies. Examples of complex topics may include, but are not limited to, reviews of complex interventions, reviews requiring the identification of study designs other than RCTs, public health and social care topics, veterinary literature, food and feed safety research.

Information professionals and others wishing to develop search strategies for complex topics face challenges in designing strategies which retrieve relevant material but are also efficient in numbers of records retrieved. As well as approaches to developing strategies to run in traditional bibliographic databases, increasingly text analytical software and text mining techniques are being used to interrogate large literatures. These techniques can be used to identify concepts in complex topics and assist with developing strategies to capture complex topics.

This training event will address the challenges of developing search strategies to capture complex topics in large bibliographic databases using different conceptual combinations and search techniques. The training event will also introduce textual analytic and text mining techniques to demonstrate their potential for strategy design and testing. Participants will undertake exercises using open source visualisation tools to investigate terms within sets of records, in order to explore the value of text mining tools in their own future search strategy design.

This advanced search course complements our Advanced Search Techniques For Systematic Reviews, Health Technology Assessment and Guideline Development Training course and Software to Support Systematic Reviews course.