Working with key concepts

You don't need to have a clearly defined research question to start searching for peer review articles in the library databases, you can start with some key concepts. Once you have them you need to work on synonyms and related search terms, which are important because articles can be written using different words for the same concept, but the databases will only search for the terms you enter into the database.

Worksheet to develop your key concepts

You can use a worksheet  to develop you own key concepts and to write down synonyms and related search terms.

Download worksheet to develop your own key concepts and synonyms (Word)

Example of filled out worksheet:

Research question: Populism and euroscepticism in the European union

Example: Worksheet for Populism and Euroscepticism in the EU (filled out)

Search techniques

Once you have your concepts, with synonymns and related search terms, you need to combine them in order to do your search. Below you can read more about combining search terms with OR and AND, as well as truncation and phrase searching.

Combining search terms with OR

EU OR European union

• retrieves any of the search terms
• makes the search broader
• the more search terms you combine with OR the better you cover the research area

Combining search terms with AND

European union AND populism

• retrieves all of the concepts
• makes the search narrower

Phrase searching

"European union"

• searches the specific phrase
• excludes articles where the search terms aren't written in the exact same order or next to each other
• narrows the search

Truncation

Populis* retrieves populism, populist, populists

• put an asterisk after the word stem (*)
• searches for different word variations
• broadens the search