The query was run in a search tool and presents a list of results.Do not immediately start trying to identify all the documents for your work.

Instead, take a few minutes to analyze how the tool responded to the query.

• Are there too many results? or too few?
• Are there a lot of irrelevant results?

Briefly review the detailed record of a few relevant results as well as a few irrelevant results.

To identify aspects to improve in the query, it is very important to understand why one result is relevant and why another is not:

• Which words are useful?
• Which words cause irrelevant results?
• In which fields are these keywords found?
  • If there are words spotted in the subject descriptors field, that's very useful!
  • If there are words found in the bibliographic references area, it's not useful at all!

Now that a  preliminary analysis has been conducted, the strengths and weaknesses of the basic query are known. The final step is to optimize the query to obtain a list of results balances relevance and comprehensiveness. This is the focus step 7!
 

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