Using Text Mining Tools to Inform Search Term Generation: An Introduction for Librarians

The use of text mining tools can help librarians improve the precision of searches, increase search sensitivity, and translate search strategies across multiple research databases. When combined with the intuitive approaches that librarians commonly use, text mining tools help reduce biases by improving the objectivity, transparency, and reproducibility of search strategies. This paper seeks to boost librarian confidence by providing a step-by-step guide for conducting text analyses with two free text mining tools, Voyant Tools and the statistical programming language R. It provides a brief introduction to concepts related to the use of text mining tools for search term generation, then details processes for using Voyant Tools and R and RStudio as investigative instruments.