When starting any search, whether you're looking for books or articles the best thing to do is to pick out the keywords in your research question or topic and go from there. Do some serious brainstorming and work to combine different keywords to create different searches.
For example, if my research topic is iGen, then I would pull out the big ideas first:
This term alone is pretty specific and a good place to start. So my first best search term is "iGen generation" (adding the quotation marks searches for the phrase itself). The next thing I want to do is think about related terms, ideas, and different ways to talk about my topic:
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What are the different ways that people talk about this topic? |
What are some topics related to iGen? |
Who/what is impacting this topic? |
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The lists can go on but it's important to write these ideas down so you can build your list of possible search words. From there, you can combine your words and start searching. Some searches to try would be:
If you want to limit your results to recent years, you would use the database filters to limit the dates the articles were published.
Depending on your results each time, your searches should change as you learn about more vocabulary, people, locations, events, policy, etc. Do lots of searches. Combine things in new ways. Add new terms. Search the full-text. Try it all. While you search note what other words come up and use them to create new searches and new leads.