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Welcome to UNL Libraries's Guide to Searching Comprehensively!
This guide is part of the Advanced Reviews series, and contains information and resources for your comprehensive search.
Table of Contents
1. Search Comprehensively
This page will get you started by describing key terms in a comprehensive search: sensitivity vs specificity, exploratory searching, systematic searching, and supplementary searching
This page provides guidance on writing a search strategy, and provides examples and further resources
3. Translate Search Strategies
This page provides guidance on translating your search strategy syntax from one database to another, and provides examples and further resources
This page defines gray literature, and provides guidance on searching various sources for your comprehensive search
Comprehensive searching occurs in 3 phases, exploratory, systematic, and supplementary. While exploratory and systematic have a defined time frame within the advanced review process, supplementary searching occurs throughout the first three review frames, Protocol, Search, and Analysis. See the following pages for more on the three phases.
Also referred to as recall and precision by White:
"Precision and recall tend to vary inversely. If one seeks high recall-complete or comprehensive searches--one must be prepared to retrieve many irrelevant documents, thereby degrading precision. Conversely, retrievals can be made highly precise, so as to cut down on false positives, but at the cost of missing many relevant documents scattered through the literature (false negatives), thereby degrading recall... The research synthesists are distinctive in wanting (or at least accepting the need for) high recall." (43)
White, H.D. (1994). Scientific communication and literature retrieval. In H. M. Cooper & L. V. Hedges (Eds). The Handbook of research synthesis. Russell Sage Foundation.
Video by Carrie Price
Created by Elle Covington (they/them), Assistant Professor Research Specialist Librarian, and Gabe Bruguier, Assistant Professor Research Specialist Librarian, UNL Libraries, originally published 10/11/2024.
