Should You Write Down What You Are Looking for Before Opening a Database?

Do You Need a Search Goal Before You Start Searching?

Opening a database feels like the natural beginning of a literature search. You have a topic in mind, so you type a few words into Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, ERIC, or another database and see what appears.

There is nothing inherently wrong with exploratory searching. The problem begins when the results themselves quietly determine what you were supposedly looking for. A few interesting papers appear, you follow their terminology, adjust the topic, add another concept, drop an inconvenient one, and eventually end up with a body of literature that may be interesting but does not necessarily answer the question that brought you there.

Writing down what you are looking for before opening the database gives the search an initial purpose against which later decisions can be judged. The important word here is initial. A search goal should guide inquiry without preventing you from learning from the literature.

Yes, Write Down What You Want the Search to Find

A Search Goal Comes Before a Search String

Your topic and your search goal are not the same thing

A topic tells you the general area you are interested in. A search goal tells you what you are trying to retrieve from that area.

Suppose your topic is generative AI in higher education. That phrase could support very different searches. You might want to identify studies of students' use of generative AI, examine how universities regulate its use, locate evidence about its effects on learning, map the methods researchers have used to study it, or find instruments for measuring attitudes toward AI.

Those searches concern the same broad topic, but they do not seek the same literature. If you begin with only the topic, it becomes easy to treat whatever the database returns as relevant simply because it mentions generative AI and higher education.

What should you actually write down?

You do not need a miniature protocol before every database search. For an ordinary literature search, one or two sentences may be enough. A useful statement usually identifies what you want to learn or locate, the central concepts involved, and any boundaries that are already important to your purpose.

For example:

I want to find empirical studies examining how university students use generative AI for academic writing and what those studies report about students' writing processes or learning.

That sentence does considerably more work than the topic label AI in education. It indicates that the search concerns university students, generative AI, academic writing, empirical research, and particular kinds of evidence. It also gives you something against which candidate search terms and retrieved papers can be evaluated.

For a more formal review, the search goal should be aligned with the review question, objectives, and protocol. Cochrane guidance, for example, describes bibliographic search strategies as being informed by the main concepts of the review and its eligibility criteria. Question frameworks can also help clarify the concepts that may need to be represented in searching, although not every element of a question necessarily belongs in the database query.

A search goal is not yet a list of keywords

Do not jump too quickly from your goal to the exact words you will type. Authors may describe the same phenomenon using different terminology, and databases may index those records under controlled vocabulary that differs from your preferred language.

The search goal identifies the concept you need. The search strategy determines how that concept can actually be retrieved. That distinction matters because a well-defined concept may require synonyms, spelling variants, broader or narrower terms, subject headings, and database-specific syntax. Academic search guidance commonly recommends identifying the central concepts first and then generating alternative terms for them.

Once your purpose is clear, you can more deliberately decide which concepts should actually become search terms rather than converting every word in your question into a keyword.

Your research question can provide the starting point

If you already have a research question, it often supplies the conceptual foundation for the search. A focused question can be decomposed into concepts that inform a search strategy, and structured frameworks such as PICO may help for suitable question types. Different questions, however, may require different frameworks, and forcing every question into PICO can distort what you actually want to investigate.

The transition from question to search therefore requires some translation. You may need to turn the research question into a form that can guide retrieval, particularly when the original question contains abstract constructs, relationships, or language that authors are unlikely to use in titles and abstracts.

For complicated questions, it may also help to separate the question into searchable concepts before developing synonyms and search syntax.

Not everything you care about must appear in the search query

This is one of the more consequential distinctions in search planning. Writing down your goal does not mean that every condition in that statement should become an AND block in the database.

Some concepts are poorly represented in titles, abstracts, keywords, or indexing. Cochrane specifically cautions that searching every aspect of a review question may be unnecessary or undesirable. Outcomes and comparators, for example, may be absent or inconsistently represented in searchable metadata, so requiring them can cause otherwise eligible studies to disappear from the result set.

Your goal therefore governs the search without necessarily being reproduced word for word by the search strategy. This is another reason why searching the entire research question as a single phrase is usually a poor substitute for designing a search around concepts.

Defining the goal helps expose hidden decisions

A deceptively simple sentence such as “I want studies about online learning” leaves many decisions unresolved. Which learners? What counts as online learning? Are you interested in effectiveness, experiences, implementation, access, or something else? Are qualitative studies relevant? Does the context matter? Must the research be recent?

You do not necessarily need to settle every issue before the first exploratory search. But writing down the goal makes these unresolved choices visible. Once visible, they can be examined rather than being decided accidentally by the first page of results.

Some of those decisions may later become explicit eligibility criteria. In a structured review, that makes the distinction between the search goal and what will ultimately count as relevant evidence particularly important.

Planning does not mean refusing to learn from the search

Early searching is often iterative. You may discover unfamiliar terminology, a theoretical distinction you had overlooked, an unexpected population, or an adjacent discipline using a completely different vocabulary. Search-strategy development commonly involves testing and refinement rather than writing one supposedly perfect query and never touching it again.

That means your initial statement can change. What matters is that the change is deliberate.

If early searching shows that your terminology or assumptions were inadequate, revise the goal and document the reasoning when the rigor of the project requires it. Later, piloting the search strategy before committing to it can help determine whether your planned retrieval approach behaves as intended.

How a Written Search Goal Changes the Search

The written goal does not magically produce the correct search string. Its value is more modest and more useful: it gives the researcher a stable reference point while the search strategy evolves.

Common Mistakes When Defining What You Want to Find

Define Enough to Search Deliberately, Then Let the Literature Teach You

Before opening a database for a substantive search, try to complete this sentence:

“I am searching for literature that will help me understand or determine ______.”

Then ask whether the sentence tells you what kind of evidence would actually help. If it merely repeats your broad topic, make it more specific. If it contains so many restrictions that you have effectively designed the entire study before learning how the literature is described, loosen it.

Once the goal is stable enough to guide searching, you can decide how broad the retrieval should initially be. That is a separate judgment from defining the goal itself, and the appropriate breadth of an initial literature search depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

Before You Open the Database

Questions About Defining a Search Goal

Know What You Are Looking for Before You Ask the Database to Find It

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