Evaluating your research strategy

Evaluating your research strategy is an essential component of conducting research. You should consider evaluating both your search strategy and your search results.

Evaluating your search strategy

As you’re researching, you will need to assess the effectiveness of your search strategy. By assessing the quality of the results you’re getting, you can determine if you need to edit or change your search strategy to locate more relevant results.

Ask yourself the following questions to help determine the quality and suitability of your search strategy:

Is the search strategy too narrow or too broad?
Does the search strategy cover relevant alternative terms and spelling variants?
Are keywords, phrases, Boolean operators and punctuation being used correctly?
Are proximity operators being used effectively?

What is a “good” number of results?

It depends. In some disciplines that have been well studied, it is common to get thousands of results. Whereas, in a specialised or newly created field of research, you may only find a handful of results. Consider the following questions with the help of a mentor or supervisor when assessing the number of results you’ve found:

What are the norms for this field of research?
What type of research am I undertaking? e.g. the requirements of a systematic review vary from other types of research
What kinds of resources am I looking for, and how regularly are these published?
What is appropriate and manageable within my timeframe?

Evaluating your search results

You will need to carefully evaluate the literature you intend to use for your research, as not all sources of information will be appropriate for inclusion. By assessing the currency, relevance, reliability and accuracy of the literature, you will be able to use the most appropriate sources and achieve better results in your research.

Apply the following criteria to help determine the quality and appropriateness of the literature you find:

Currency

When was the literature published or posted?
Has the information been revised or updated?

Relevance

Does the literature directly relate to your topic?
Is it culturally appropriate and relevant?
Who is the intended audience?

Reliability

Who is the author or publisher of the literature?
Is it from a reliable source with clear licencing or copyright information?
Is the literature personal opinion and subjective or evidence-based information and objective?

Accuracy

Are the findings supported by evidence from a reliable source?
Has the literature been peer-reviewed?