Library Guides
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It is important to find all the relevant keywords for the topic to ensure the search is comprehensive by identifying
There are many ways to locate these terms, including background reading, dictionaries, regular and database thesauri or subject headings and text mining tools. The process of searching will also help identify more terms.
There needs to be a balance in searching between making the search comprehensive enough to encompass everything on the topic and precise enough to only capture those results that are specifically relevant.
Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages
Type of Search |
Comprehensive |
Precise |
|---|---|---|
Advantages |
Broad search finds everything on topic | Specific to topic so results are more relevant |
|
|
Lessens chance of missing relevant papers |
Easier to discard irrelevant results |
Disadvantages |
Too much information to process easily | Not enough results |
|
|
Many irrelevant results to discard | Many relevant papers missed as topic too narrow |
Increasing the comprehensiveness (or sensitivity) of a search will reduce its precision and will retrieve more non-relevant articles.
Text mining will help identify how often terms come up in the literature and help identify other related terms and subject headings that have not been considered or thought of as being useful.Text mining is a process used to look at large amounts of text and find relationships in the results by using computer programs designed to extract and analyse this data.
It is used to categorise information and identify trends and patterns which can be done across large documents or multiple sources (or both).
1. Mining for terms
Use these tools to find alternate search terms that are related by identifying how often keywords appear and which other terms appear with them by number of occurrences.
2. Mine within the text
Locate terms within blocks of text (e.g. an article) to find word patterns and frequency. More frequent words are more likely to be relevant to the topic.
3. Use visualising tools
These tools create word clouds related to search terms
These are just some of the tools available for mining text that are available on the web. There is also both commercial and free software that can be downloaded and installed. The web pages linked below have lists of yet more tools.
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