Activité 30 avril 2025 - Techniques and tools for identifying noise and reducing its impact on searches

Description 

Creating search strategies, particularly for complex research questions, can be challenging. This is particularly the case where topics are fuzzy or the terms used are general or can have several meanings. Developing searches in these cases may generate irrelevant records which create overheads in terms of screening. Identifying the sources of noise in a search strategy may help us to fine tune the strategy to reduce the volume of records produced by those sources. A range of tools and techniques are available to help us identify concepts in a set of search results and thereby find ways to reduce their involvement in the searches.

In this seminar, we will look at tools and techniques to find the concepts within search results and discuss approaches to reduce the impact of specific concepts on search strategies. We will look at VosViewer, Voyant Tools, Carrot2 and other tools and approaches. The two hour session will include time for questions and discussion.

Biography / Biographie

The seminar presenter will be Julie Glanville. Julie Glanville is an independent consultant who has more than thirty years' experience of searching in the context of systematic reviews. She is also an active trainer and researcher in a range of searching issues. She is a co-author of the Cochrane Handbook chapter on searching for reviews and a co-manager of two websites: the ISSG Search Filter Resource and SuReInfo.
ORCID | Google Scholar