After you have identified your research question using the PCC framework (see Step 1), you can use your PCC breakdown to start building your initial search strategy by mapping your PCC elements to search concepts.
Here's an example using our sample research question:
PCC Model:
P - Population - N/A
C - Concept - Chronic disease; nurse-led models of care
C - Context - High-income countries
Search Concepts:
Concept #1: Chronic disease
Concept #2: Nurse-led models of care
Concept #3: High-income countries
The next step in the process is to identify all relevant keywords and subject headings.
Keywords are words or phrases that can be searched for in different database fields such as title, abstract, author keywords, journal etc. Revisiting your research question will help you determine the relevant terms.
Subject headings are assigned to bibliographic records in a database by indexers in order to identify the main concepts of an article. Different databases use their own subject heading classification systems.
Search strategies for scoping reviews can be incredibly complex, and require you to have knowledge of searching techniques such as Boolean logic (the use of AND, OR, NOT) to connect terms together.
You can learn more about this process by watching the video below.