NUTRITION RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES
Week 1: Information literacy
Information literacy: the ability to think critically and make balanced judgments about any
information we find and use.
- Important > develop strategies to search effectively and efficiently and assess the
quality and trustworthiness of your sources.
Competency areas:
1. Orientate: identifies information needs and sources and gathers information for
orientation on a topic.
2. Prepare: formulates a focused research question for a literature search and a
strategy to prepare a systematic search.
3. Search: builds a systematic search for various databases and platforms and uses
relevant articles to find additional information and search items.
4. Evaluate: evaluates the search results, revises the search if necessary and
determines when to stop searching.
5. Manage: stores and organizes information systematically and transparently, keeps
track of the search process and stays up-to-date with new information on the topic.
6. Communicate: cite and references correctly to avoid plagiarism and copyright
infringement, and selects the most appropriate source to publish.
,There are disciplinary and multidisciplinary repositories. Disciplinary repositories contain
data from a specific scientific discipline and its subfields, while multidisciplinary repositories
contain data from many different disciplines.
Boolean operators: help narrow or broaden a search when you use them between search
terms. Three Boolean operators are: AND, OR and NOT.
- Parentheses ensure that the separate parts or words are combined in the right order.
- OR: this will find documents that contain any of these terms.
- AND: only find documents that contain both concepts.
o You can ensure the processing order of the operators by using parentheses.
Wildcards: can be used for words with the same root or for words that differ by one letter.
- Question mark: wom?n finds woman and women.
- Asterisk: econom* finds economic, economics, economical, etc.
Proximity operators:
PRE/3
- Retrieves records with both terms within 3 fewer words in the specified order.
-
W/4
- Retrieves records with both terms within 4 or fewer words in any order.
, -
Adj1
- Retrieves records with both terms next to each other in any order.
Adj5
- Retrieves records with both terms within 4 or fewer words in any order.
-
Check the quality of your search:
1. What is the percentage of relevant records compared to all records in your search
results? (precision of your search)
2. What is the percentage of relevant records compared to all relevant records in
existence? (recall of your search).
, Snowballing: search strategy where you follow a thread. The reference listed in the
publications lead you to other, but older relevant publications. And if you look these up in
Scopus, Web of Science or Scholar, you find papers that cite this publication and are
therefore younger.
Bibliographic databases:
SCOPUS automatically finds spelling variations and singular/plural terms, even for words
between quotation marks, you don’t need to use any wildcards or multiple terms in this case.
PubMed enhances (translates) your search by adding MeSH terms (descriptive keywords),
alternative words and alternative spelling of words.
- By adding the search field tag (MeSH) you’ll only search in the MeSH field of a
record. So, these articles are indexed for MEDLINE.
Week 1: Information literacy
Information literacy: the ability to think critically and make balanced judgments about any
information we find and use.
- Important > develop strategies to search effectively and efficiently and assess the
quality and trustworthiness of your sources.
Competency areas:
1. Orientate: identifies information needs and sources and gathers information for
orientation on a topic.
2. Prepare: formulates a focused research question for a literature search and a
strategy to prepare a systematic search.
3. Search: builds a systematic search for various databases and platforms and uses
relevant articles to find additional information and search items.
4. Evaluate: evaluates the search results, revises the search if necessary and
determines when to stop searching.
5. Manage: stores and organizes information systematically and transparently, keeps
track of the search process and stays up-to-date with new information on the topic.
6. Communicate: cite and references correctly to avoid plagiarism and copyright
infringement, and selects the most appropriate source to publish.
,There are disciplinary and multidisciplinary repositories. Disciplinary repositories contain
data from a specific scientific discipline and its subfields, while multidisciplinary repositories
contain data from many different disciplines.
Boolean operators: help narrow or broaden a search when you use them between search
terms. Three Boolean operators are: AND, OR and NOT.
- Parentheses ensure that the separate parts or words are combined in the right order.
- OR: this will find documents that contain any of these terms.
- AND: only find documents that contain both concepts.
o You can ensure the processing order of the operators by using parentheses.
Wildcards: can be used for words with the same root or for words that differ by one letter.
- Question mark: wom?n finds woman and women.
- Asterisk: econom* finds economic, economics, economical, etc.
Proximity operators:
PRE/3
- Retrieves records with both terms within 3 fewer words in the specified order.
-
W/4
- Retrieves records with both terms within 4 or fewer words in any order.
, -
Adj1
- Retrieves records with both terms next to each other in any order.
Adj5
- Retrieves records with both terms within 4 or fewer words in any order.
-
Check the quality of your search:
1. What is the percentage of relevant records compared to all records in your search
results? (precision of your search)
2. What is the percentage of relevant records compared to all relevant records in
existence? (recall of your search).
, Snowballing: search strategy where you follow a thread. The reference listed in the
publications lead you to other, but older relevant publications. And if you look these up in
Scopus, Web of Science or Scholar, you find papers that cite this publication and are
therefore younger.
Bibliographic databases:
SCOPUS automatically finds spelling variations and singular/plural terms, even for words
between quotation marks, you don’t need to use any wildcards or multiple terms in this case.
PubMed enhances (translates) your search by adding MeSH terms (descriptive keywords),
alternative words and alternative spelling of words.
- By adding the search field tag (MeSH) you’ll only search in the MeSH field of a
record. So, these articles are indexed for MEDLINE.
