Sorting and evaluating the research results (3/10)

An efficient research includes analysing and sorting search results. We recommend to proceed with sorting your search results in two steps.

First, have a look at the search results in the database or the library catalogue where you conduct your search and see if they fulfil your criteria. Are they relevant to your topic? Is/are the author(s) familiar to you? Are the language and publication form appropriate? Are they published within the time span you are interested in? Depending on the search platform, you can also choose whether to sort your results by relevance or publication time.

Next, analyse your search results more critically – look at each source individually.  In the abstracts, summaries, and tables of contents you can check whether the sources are relevant to your topic. On the one hand, your keywords may appear in the title of a text, which does not necessarily imply that the text itself is relevant to your topic. On the other hand, a title may contain none of your keywords and formulate the topic differently instead. The text itself, however, might be perfectly suitable for your topic, which will be obvious from the subject tags and content description.

You can always use the CRAAP test, which you learnt about in chapter 1, to check if the text meets the criteria of academic quality.