Research through the Library

After you have a topic for your assignment you may want to devise a search strategy before you begin looking through article databases and the online catalog for information.  

First, you will want to break your topic down into basic concepts.  For example, if your topic is "the effects of high school bullying on academic performance" 

The main concepts for this topic are: high school, bullying, and academic performance  

All of these concepts are prominent aspects of the search topic, as you can see the word "effects" has been left out as a search keyword since databases do not operate like internet search engines. Keywords or phrases are intended for database searches. If your term includes several words, please put "parenthesis around the phrase.'

Next, come up with synonyms and related search terms.  Some examples might be:

high school = "secondary school," teenagers, "high school students"

bullying = antagonize, intimidation

academic performance = "academic success," grades, achievements

Notice that these terms yield narrow and broad search results. Broad search results indicate a large number of resources to sift through. While other terms yield smaller or narrow search results, limiting the user to a couple of resources.  If you need more search results a broader term may help you, while a narrow term may help to decrease the number of results.  Then, create a list of synonyms to have on hand when you search.