Crafting Your Search Strategy: Brainstorming

Step Two

Brainstorm synonyms for your key concepts. As you translate your search to the language(s) used by your resource(s), you will want to attempt to match your key terms with the terms your resource might use. There may be many other options to describe your terms i.e., synonyms.

Your initial search strategy will be a keyword one (this important distinction, keyword will be explained later!). You want to make sure your search returns all relevant resources. While you don’t need to understand the ins and outs of a how a search works, knowing the behind-the-scenes basics when you search a database, Google, etc. underscores how important Step 2 is for research.

For instance, if you jump in a database and search using the keyword, post-secondary, you are instructing the database to return any resource (e.g., journal article) that includes the word post-secondary. If the author(s) of the perfect resource for the research used college and not post-secondary in the article, it would not return this perfect resource. In other words, the database searches exactly what it is told to search; it doesn’t assess if what you are searching is a solid and comprehensive search, it simply matches your keyword to that word in its holdings.

You will want to do your best to figure out, or translate, the search into the language the resource speaks. Brainstorming synonyms to your terms is a wonderful first stage in translation. This is similar to using a phrase book or dictionary as you begin to learn a ‘foreign’ language.

If you would like to add to the brainstorming, contribute your synonyms. Please add them using a colour different from the default black to differentiate between the original and additions.