Example: "Is meditation an effective therapeutic tool for college students with generalized anxiety disorder?"
Concepts: "Meditation" "Therapy OR Therapeutic" "College students" "Anxiety"
3. You may need to narrow or broaden your search terms if you are getting too many or too few results with a search.
4. If you hit a dead end, that is a normal part of searching. Try changing up your search terms, checking to see if you are using common terminology, or ask for help from the library. We are here to help you search.
Remember that not every author will use the same terms, even if the ideas are similar. Use all the tools available to you to help you find synonyms or professional or discipline-specific terms to search for your topic. Here are some examples:
1. For topics on DIVERSITY - try "Cross-cultural", "Cultural", "Ethnology" or "transcultural"
2. For topics on a specific population, try synonyms for that population. Example: Child, children, teens, adolescents, high school students, youth
3. For topics that may have subtopics try both the larger category and the subcategory. For example, if you are researching sports injuries and mental health, try both "Sports" and "baseball" or whichever sport you might be interested in.
Another example of this is figuring out which branch of psychology your topic might fit into. When you are using search terms, try both "psychology" AND "developmental psychology". You will get a larger number of results with a broader topic. So switch back and forth between a narrower term and a broader term if you are finding too few or too many results.
4. Try variations on phrases. Example: Sex, sexual behavior, sexual health, sexual response, sexual disorders. Once you begin to see articles that you are interested in, you will learn which variants of a phrase are the most successful for the particular search you are doing.
Remember to use the autocomplete in an individual database. This autocomplete is telling you what search terms or phrases are used in the database and will have real articles attached to them. The autocomplete is also a good source of synonyms and professional terms as well.
Also use the Subject tags, Keyword tags, and the abstract attached to a journal article to help you quickly skip to other articles related to the one you found.