When planning a search strategy, you will want to brainstorm related words or phrases for searching. When considering related terms:
- Be flexible and come up with a variety of keywords and phrases
- Try several different combinations of keywords and phrases when searching
- Use dictionaries, thesauri, and other words that can be found in database records
- Remember, not all concepts/keywords will have related terms
- Note that words such as effect or impact are of secondary importance in a research question - they are not main ideas
The figure below gives some examples of related terms for social media and online classroom.
