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Creating a search strategy for your research is the one of the most important steps. If you don't use the right terms or words, you won't be able to locate the information you need.

For example, if you want to find information about teens going to college you will need to take some time think about a few things:

Do you know if the author or person creating the information uses the term teen, teenager, adolescent, young adult, high school student, or youth to describe someone in their teen years?

If an author uses adolescent or adolescence and you only search for teen, you will not find that author's information. And, it might be the information that best satisfies your need.

And, the same dilemma exists for the term college. Does the author use the word college, universtiy, or post secondary education?

What to do?

• Brainstorm all the words you know that describe your topic or term. Write them down.

• Get an overview of the topic--start researching and pay attention to the vocubulary and words you find in the information. Encyclopedias and databases are a good place to get general information. Read some of articles or pages and highlight terms that might help you find more or different information.

• Try all of the terms so you don't miss anything important.

Here are some shortcuts to searching different forms of a word:

Use the wild card, *, to search different forms of a word. For example, place the * after the word, teen, and you will be searching teens, teenager, teenagers as well as teen.

What about different words that mean similar things?

Use the operator, OR, between terms so that you are searching either term. For example, teen OR adolescent OR youth will search for all terms at the same time.

Use the operator, AND, between terms so that all terms must be found in a single piece of information

You can combine the tricks above to create a simple search strategy for finding information about teens going to college. For example:

teen* AND college OR university

OR

teen* OR adolescent AND college

Understand?

What tips can you add?