INTG 100: Plagues and Pandemics, Past and Present

Once you have a research topic in mind, identify your topic's central ideas or main concepts. Try writing down your research topic or question and then list a couple of main concepts.

Example Topic: The effect of social media use on college students’ sleep.
Example Research Question: What measures can college students take to effectively limit social media's negative effects on their sleep?

Once you've identified the main concepts, generate a list of search terms (or keywords and key phrases) under each concept. Consider related terms or synonyms (e.g., social media and social networks), broader terms (online behavior or internet), and more specific terms (e.g., Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, X):

As you search for information and learn more about your topic, notice any other terms (related, broader, or more specific) that are used in your readings or source documents and add them to your list. 

Start with your search terms and then connect them using search operators like AND, OR, NOT, "quotation marks", (parentheses), and *asterisks.

• Use quotation marks to search multiple words/phrases together (e.g. "climate change" will be searched as a singular concept, whereas climate and change would be searched as separate concepts)
• Use an asterisk (this method is called truncation) to search for several word endings at once (e.g. politic* will search politic, politics, political, politicize, etc.)
• Use parentheses to keep AND/OR/NOT phrasing together

From Slippery Rock University

You can try a concept map to visualize your topic and develop search strings from there.

“Concept Maps” by The Learning Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.