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,
Use the truncation symbol (asterisk *) to capture variant endings of a word:
Example: adolescen* will retrieve adolescent, adolescents, adolescence.
Use quotes to search for words or a phrase in exact order:
Example: "self esteem"