After you have transferred your search to all the databases and sources that you want to cover, the next stage is to verify your search. This means that you need to check if your search has retrieved the key documents that you already knew about or found in Step 1?

In order to validate your results and check that you haven't missed anything, you could also do the following searches at this stage: 

• Citation searches: look at references of key articles and look at who has cited it and follow the trail. Do these references feature in your own original search results?
• Author searches: pick out your key authors in area and do some author searches in databases. Do these authors / references feature in your own original search results?
• Contact individual key researchers in the field. What articles do they recommend?  Do these references feature in your own original search results?
• Consult subject bibliographies. Do these references feature in your own original search results?
• Hand searching: choose a few eminent journals and conference proceedings and browse through them to see if there are any pertinent articles which relate to your research. Do these references feature in your own original search results?

If you find some articles that are missing from your search ask following questions:

• Are these articles indexed in the databases I’ve searched?
  • If yes, why didn’t my search pick them up? What keywords / subject headings have they been assigned? Re-examine your own search criteria and amend as necessary.
  • If no, where are these articles found / indexed? Do you need to be searching other databases?

Depending on the answers that you find, you may need to go back and update your Full Search Plan and re-run some of your searches.