Okay, remember
way back to Chapter One, where we talked about keywords and synonyms and
related terms?
(Refresh your
memory.)
The next step is to identify the most important concepts in your research question. These concepts will be the keywords that you will use in your searching.
What are the effects of stress on college students?
Don't stop here though! There's still some more preparation to do!
There is often more than one way to say something. You can say you are happy, or ecstatic or joyful. These words all mean basically the same thing.
Before you start searching, you should look over your keywords and decide whether they have synonyms that you should also be on the lookout for. You might miss some important information if you don't think strategically and take synonyms into account.
| Keywords | Synonyms |
|---|---|
| effects | impact, results |
| stress | mental or emotional strain |
| college | university, higher education |
We went to a lot of trouble to find just the right words to use in our searches. Now we're going to learn how to put those words together into expressions that make sense to the computer.
To do this, we need to use some small but powerful words that we will call "search connectors".
Search connectors are used:
1) to connect the terms of a search strategy together, and
2) to describe how the terms relate to one another.
Let's look at how search connectors work.
