1) When setting up your search, identify the most important words in your topic to build a search strategy.

For example, if your topic was: What motivates college students to smoke e-cigarettes?

We could select:       motivation   college students          e-cigarettes

2) Brainstorm keywords that could be used to describe the concepts. For example:  college students, motivation, factors, reasons, intentions, e-cigarettes

Now we can combine our possible keywords into a search strategy that can be used to search for articles in a database:

college students

AND

motivation OR reasons OR factors OR intentions

AND

e-cigarettes

NOTE: Capitalize connectors AND, OR when setting up a search to designate them as connector words in your search,