Once you've decided what topic you are interested in researching, think about what terminology you would use to search in the library databases. Unlike Google, you can't search for a sentence or a question in the databases; instead you want to pick out keywords which encompass your topic and use those to search in the databases. Think of synonyms and other ways to say the same things, this will help you to find more resources on your topic.
Use the PDFs below to help you create a search strategy.
The example provided in "Making a Search Strategy" examines the question, what are causes of mental health issues among college students? From this, the words or phrases I would pull out to search would be "mental health" and "college students." When searching these, I want to place quotations around "mental health" so that these two words are searched together as a phrase. Same for "college students." Not doing this allows the database to search each word independently and you will not only end up with more information that you want to look at, but you will find lots of irrelevant information to your topic.
Unfortunately "mental health" is a really broad topic, so you will want to narrow topic down a little more. Instead of searching "mental health," think of an aspect of mental health that you are interested in. In the example we focus on depression; conducting a new search for depression AND "college students"
There are many resources on this topic, but we still want to think of ways that we might refine this search. In this case, there are several articles that talk about depression among first generation college students. As such, I decided to conduct a new search for "first generation college students" AND depression. We now have several relevant sources we can use for writing our research paper.
This step by step process in reflected on the first page of the PDF. The second page is a blank form where you can write down your own research question and keywords that you can use in the databases. Give it a try!
