Masters Literature Review- database hell

[Sharingtoomuch]

Good Evening, can anyone help a struggling mature student please?
I am stuck on my dissertation (a literature review and research proposal) at the hurdle of finding my core papers to appraise.

I have researched my topic area and identified a literature review question, then I produced search keywords and developed them into Boolean strings.
BUT only some of the papers that I was expecting to come up have appeared in my search ( the papers I know to be relevant having researched the topic! ).
I need to do a systematic review so not much if any snowballing but I’m going round in circles alternating my search terms trying to get all the papers I want to critically appraise in my search results! What am I doing wrong I’m wasting so much time and getting really panicked.
Thank you in advance.

Have you been told you need to use a specific database to find your literature? Is it a library database? A good Google Scholar search might help? Or if you know specific texts/authors you can just put those into the library catalogue or into Scholar directly.

Echoing PP - which database are you using? Do you understand how to combine terms to widen your search? (A common mistake is not understanding how to use OR and AND properly)
Do you have time for a chat with a helpful librarian at your university?
Can you share your search strategy here? I’m retired now but spent many years helping students with their searches
(sorry for all the questions)

Depending on your field you might find Perplexity or Research Rabbit useful as a starting point. And sorry if this is stating the obvious but you can use the list of references at the end of a paper.

Its odd if titles you know are not appearing in your search and I appreciate why that might be disconcerting. Do you have a library support contact? They are the experts and can set you straight.

Definitely consider talking to your librarian / information specialist if you can - best people in the world!

Here are some things you can try first.

Depending on the database you’re searching, you should be able to build your search, line by line - put each line of your search string into this carefully check the number of results for each line. I’m guessing the problem occurs when you start combining and it should allow you to detect the point that your numbers are going down when you’re not expecting them to.

Usually this is a logic fail in the search string and can happen to all
of us - librarians check stuff all the time where someone knows they’ve made an error but are struggling to see where (and possibly even more when they’ve not even noticed the error so you’re ahead of the game there!).

If this is no help you could post your search string here and we could have a look to see if you’ve fallen into any obvious traps - we could tell you what the string is doing and you can see if that matches what you want it to do!

I’m assuming this isn’t pages long, though!

If you’re stuck after this get your uni librarian involved!

Nowadays some papers have very few keywords. More so fos some topics. You need to search whole papers not just title and key words. The way you say you've been working is creating a bias. The idea of a literature review is that someone else would get the same results with the same search? Maybe make your Boolean string more vague?

I don’t think @Sharingtoomuch is only searching key words like MeSH or Emtree, @timoteigirl - she’s got key words for her topic which she’s building into a search. Presumably at least across titles and abstracts.

Thank you all so much for replying. I have had another hard day of searching. I think I’m in a better place than yesterday possibly but I will sit down with a G&T now and have a look through all the advice on here. I may well come back tomorrow on posting strings I’ve used etc. I did ask a librarian but she seemed very busy, very young and tbh I just ended up feeling a bit old and stupid!!

Ai is great for creating your search strings and keywords. Give chatgbt/ co pilot your search concepts, and then it will give you the possible keywords for each concept and then let it know which data bases you are searching and it will give you the search strings and how to combine them with the Boolean operators

Rather than just asking a librarian at the desk you need to contact the academic liaison librarian for your subject to make an appointment - this is their actual job and they will be extremely helpful. Their details should be on the library website. The ones at the desk will be library assistants (& yes often young and busy) so not as knowledgeable/ specialist

You'll find that the article which do come up contain bibliographies of additional articles, of which some will also be useful.

This. The people at the library desk are not usually librarians and won't be able to give you in-depth help with database searching.

It could be that the terms you are using do not appear in the searchable fields of the studies you were expecting to find.

It's a very niggly process sometimes and the librarian for your subject will know how to dissect it and approach it.

Good luck!

It's a useful starting point but still needs human input - AI often gets the syntax wrong for specific databases

Expecting to see certain key papers in your results is normal. Like you say though, you can't bias the search strategy by putting in random terms just to bring up those papers. The strategy has to reflect the question at the right levels of sensitivity and specificity.

If she is searching a database that uses subject headings, those should be used alongside keywords to cover all bases.

Not all databases allow for full text searching either, often just title, abstract, subject headings and other index terms.

Thanks everyone, for context my question is what are the lived experiences of ASD adolescents who mask? My search terms are autism, adolescents, masking/camouflage and lived experience with numerous synonyms and I can’t post them because I’ve gone quite broad!! I am at the stage of now getting the papers I expected/wanted. But I have questions, for example I had to include boys and girls to pick up papers that didn’t explicitly use the terms adolescent/teenager. I then used all the gender diverse terms as well in the interests of fairness! I want to include all. Is this reasonable or does it mean I’m bias in some way? Also, I have used the term ‘school age’but didn’t use ‘students’ as that brought up a massive number of university student research and my age group is younger teenagers. Any advice please? So many questions!

Could you not use the papers you’ve found and then in your prism diagram add the additional papers in from google scholar search?

<not done a masters, just BSc>

Are you narrowing down according to a country?

Not a specific country no.
its a general search not country specific

My search terms were too specific and filtered out papers I needed. I went broader, then downloaded the spreadsheets of abstracts and refined from there

If you want to focus only on adolescents, irrespective of gender, it might be fine to just use terms like adolescen , teen , "young person", "young people", youth* etc and maybe ones reflecting school level like secondary school, high school etc. If you start putting in boys and girls, you'll get more stuff about younger kids too. If your databases have subject headings, there are often ones that cover life stages e.g. adolescent, so you should be using those too as well as ones that reflect your other concepts.

You are likely doing a systematic literature review rather than a real, formalised systematic review (which are normally done in teams and aim to find everything), so you don't need to find absolutely everything.

But really, make an appointment with a librarian for proper support! We know our stuff 😉

Sorry, above, it's removed the asterisks after 'adolescen' and 'teen'

Thank you x I will make another appointment with a different subject librarian, fingers crossed 🤞

Echo the advice to speak to your academic librarian. They are experts in all this stuff. Are you keeping records of which search terms and search types you are using in which database?
Databases these days are quite helpful but you may need to beware of American spellings vs British English, use the correct truncation or wildcard symbols for each database. Each relevant database may have different coverage or some overlapping. Get an appointment with your subject/ faculty specialist librarian asap!

Hi, I've sent you a PM and have just seen your topic.

I'm a medical/healthcare librarian and have come up against similar issues when narrowing search terms to, for instance, just children or adults. This approach managed to nicely exclude papers that covered both, including papers known to the enquirers.. ! Every indexer is slightly different, to add to the joy.

Databases I'd recommend for your search would be Cinahl, Medline, Embase, and some of the social sciences databases depending on which university you're with.

Also try one concept at a time and then combine them: (adolescen OR teen) OR (other search terms Bigrainbowscarf mentioned), then try narrowing it down by patient ages. As this is likely to be qualitative data (questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, feedback) you may need to add in those terms also.

Recently we are getting a lot of requests for searches around patient experience and I've been astonished at this gap in the literature.

Good luck, and see if you can get an appointment with your social sciences or healthcare librarian.