Cancer patients
Adult
A good research question also leads to a direct answer in the form of a thesis.
Some good words and phrases to include in your research question include:
Searchable Questions (from Bissett et al., 2025, p. 58):
Broad Question Key Elements |
|
|---|---|
Population |
Adult Cancer Patients |
Setting |
Palliative Care |
Topic or Intervention |
Spiritual Support / Spirituality-based interventions |
Outcome (if needed) |
Quality of Life, etc. / Providing Support |
Your keywords should be in the research question that you wrote above. Highlight your keywords in your question:
In adult cancer patients in palliative care, what are the best strategies regarding spiritual support?
spiritual
adult
cancer
palliative
support
Generally speaking, when searching literature, you are not searching the full-text article. Instead, you are searching certain citation data fields, like title, abstract, keyword, controlled vocabulary (subject headings) terms, and more. When developing a literature search, a good place to start is to identify searchable concepts of the research question, and then expand by adding other terms to describe those concepts.
Different authors may use slightly different words to describe the same idea. For example, one author may write an article on college students and religion, while another may write about university students and religion. Limiting your search to “college students” will keep you from finding articles about “university students.” Therefore, you should always consider possible synonyms for each of your concepts.
Disciplinary databases often have subject headings (a set of official terms used to describe something). For example, the American Psychological Association Thesaurus is a list of subject heading terms that are assigned to items indexed in the PsycINFO database. Subject heading searching can improve the relevance of your search results since other items in the database about the same thing will have the same subject heading.
Multidisciplinary databases like Web of Science do not have subject headings and must be searched with keywords.
good initial strategy
must perform searches with synonymous words/terms
more likely to have irrelevant results
standardized words or phrases used to categorize literature
relevant results are much more likely
subject headings are not consistent across databases
More on Controlled vocabulary (subject headings) is a set of terminology assigned to citations to describe the content of each reference. Searching with controlled vocabulary can improve the relevancy of search results. Many databases assign controlled vocabulary terms to citations, but their naming schema is often specific to each database. For example, the controlled vocabulary system searchable via PubMed & Medline is MeSH, or Medical Subject Headings. Cinahl is indexed with Cinahl Headings. See the video below on how to search for the controlled vocabulary in Cinahl & Medline.
Note: Controlled vocabulary may be outdated, and some databases allow users to submit requests to update terminology.
Truncation |
Phrase Searching |
Wildcards |
Nesting |
|---|---|---|---|
Broaden your search to include variant word endings and spellings. Enter the root of the word then the truncation symbol, usually the asterisk *. |
Use quotation marks " " around search words to search for a phrase - only use this around two or more words. Using the phrase search will help you narrow your results. |
Substitute a symbol for just one character. The most commonly used wildcard symbol is a pound sign # |
Use parentheses () to put search words into sets. Terms in the parentheses are processed first. Use nesting with AND, OR, & NOT. |
Examples:nurs* = nurse, nurses, nursingreligio* = religion, religions, religious, religiosity |
Examples:"end of life""spiritual care" |
Examples:wom#n = women, womanm#n = men, man |
Examples:(screening or detect*) and lupus(cancer* or neoplasm*) and "spiritual* care" |
The organizational structure of literature searches is very important. Specifically, how terms are grouped (or nested) and combined with Boolean operators will drastically impact search results. These commands tell databases exactly how to combine terms together, and if done incorrectly or inefficiently, search results returned may be too broad or irrelevant.
For example, in Medline:
(religio* OR spiritual*) AND cancer* is a properly combined search and it produces around 40,000 results.
religio* OR spiritual* AND cancer* is not properly combined. Databases may read it as everything about religio* OR everything about (spiritual* AND cancer*), which would produce more results than needed.
We recommend one or more of the following:
use a separate search box for each set of synonyms
put all your synonyms together inside a set of parentheses, then put AND between the closing parenthesis of one set and the opening parenthesis of the next set
run each set of synonyms as a separate search, and then combine all your searches
ask a librarian if your search produces too many or too few results
religio* or spiritual* or faith* or christian* or islam* or muslim* or jew* or judaism or pray* or meditat*
AND palliative or "end of life" or terminal* or dying or hospice or death
AND cancer* or oncolog* or neoplasm* or tumor* or malignan* or carcinoma
AND support* or need* or assist* or aid* or peace*
Age Group or Age Related Check box: All Adult
Now you will decide which databases you will use. This will depend on your topic; for instance, if you are focusing on a mental health issue, you may want to include APA PsycInfo or if you are focusing on education, you may want to include ERIC and Academic Search Premier. You can see a list of all the databases recommended on the A-Z database list. Click on the tab Journal Articles & Databases for some suggestions to get started. At a minimum, you should search in Cinahl and Medline.
Aside from searching databases by topic, another very important way of discovering research is using the reference list of articles and seeing who else has cited the article. How many times an article has been cited can tell you not only how influential an article has been, but can lead you to more articles on your topic.
Supplementary searching is critical for a scoping review, even more so than for other types of reviews. This is because the purpose of a scoping review is to determine the full scope of the literature on your topic. This means searching for things outside of the databases, which are limited in scope and may exclude relevant research.
Literature searches can be supplemented by hand searching. One of the most popular ways this is done with reviews is by searching the reference list and citing articles of studies included in the review. Another method is manually browsing key journals in your field to make sure no relevant articles are missed. Other sources that may be considered for hand searching include clinical trial registries, white papers and other reports, pharmaceutical or other corporate reports, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations, or professional association guidelines. In addition, citation searching might include getting articles on your topic from professors, colleagues, and classmates. WARNING: Be sure you report these in the appropriate spot on the Prisma flow Diagram!
It's important to keep a clear record of your supplementary search strategies and results. Note just where and how you searched, and which included sources were found via these strategies.
If you find you are outside the "safe zone" and deep into a topic, you will want to evaluate the reliability of this information. There are many websites to help with this information "sniff test".
Enough said!
