Once you have identified where you would like to look for your information needs, you can then search for the information you need. The concepts that you used to build your research question can also be used to develop a research statement. For example, suppose your research question is “How does a student’s religious orientation influence their well-being?”. The concepts covered in this research statement include students, religious orientation, and well-being. These are also the terms one can search for in a database.

To optimize your search strategy with key terms, use the concepts or phrases in your research sentence. Try to think of possible synonyms for the concept terms. In addition, if the database has a thesaurus or a controlled vocabulary, you can search your concept words or phrases to determine which terms the databases use.