Once you have your research topic or question picked out, identify the key concepts or words in it. These 2-4 words or so will be your keywords or search terms. These terms should represent the foundational components of the topic and your research interest in it. Once you've selected these initial search terms, determine some synonyms for them so that you can widen your net if necessary (try an online thesaurus like Thesaurus.com for help with this part!).

Ex. Topic: Wildlife ecology of bears

Initial Search Terms: "wildlife" + "bears"

Possible synonyms/alternate search terms: "ecology," "wildlife management," "wildlife research"

Consider whether your initial search terms are too narrow or too broad based on the relevance and the quantity of the results. Maybe in this first search attempt you realize that "bears" is too broad of a category and specify just one species instead. Or perhaps you notice an alternate term that appears frequently in potential articles like "bear populations." Research is a process of exploration so keep your mind open to new possible routes to take!

Search Strategies to Improve Your Search Results

When a search is too broad, you may become overwhelmed with too many results that don't apply to your research question. Refining your search is a key step to maximize the efficiency of a search and to reduce irrelevant results. This can be done by applying a number of search strategies. One of the easiest and quickest strategies is to utilize the AND/OR/NOT options in a database like Academic Search Premier to selectively combine or exclude search terms in the results. These three commands are called Boolean Operators.

So you've found one article that's perfect for you and you want to find more that are as similar as possible. Try these tricks for using one specific article as a jumping off point to locate more sources:

1.  Check the tagged Subject Terms. These links will bring you to a results page of everything tagged with that subject, so if your topic is very narrow these results will likely need to be refined a bit further.

2. Consult the article's references or bibliography at the end of the full-text document. The author of an academic paper will have many citations of the relevant work of other experts and some of these other sources may also speak to your interest in the topic.

3. When looking at an article page in Academic Search Premier, check for a button on the left side of the screen called Find Similar Results. This button will perform another search in the database, this time with keywords directly from the article you found useful already.

BONUS: Google Scholar "Cited By" Tool

While Google itself is not typically an academic-level information resource, Google Scholar is a separate open access database created to facilitate scholarship and has a very useful feature for finding related articles. Clicking the Cited By link in an article's description will bring you to a list of publications that have cited that article in their own research. Using this feature of Google Scholar will allow you to have a number of immediately relevant documents at your fingertips!