The query was run in a search tool and presents a list of results. Don't start right away trying to locate all the documents for the job.

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

• Are there too many results? Not enough?
• Are there a lot of irrelevant results?

Briefly review the detailed record of some relevant results as well as some non-relevant 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:

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

Now that a first analysis has been carried out, the strengths and weaknesses of the basic query are known. The last step is then to optimize the query to obtain a list of results presenting the best balance between the relevance of the results and their exhaustiveness. This is what step 7 is about!