Service Alert
To build a search in a database, focus on the key concepts of your research question. For our question, "Does using TikTok lead to anxiety among teens?", we can break this into 3 concepts:
Rather than typing the research question directly into a database or library search tool, we can just enter our main concepts (keywords) into the search bar:
All of the search results will have all three of these exact words somewhere in the text of the item or its metadata (information associated with the results, like tags, authors, or categories).
Since the database only looks for the actual words you use in the search box, you'll need to make sure you include all the other ways researchers might describe the concepts in your search.
Since "TikTok" is a brand name, we don't need to find synonyms for that.
Since "anxiety" is a specific disorder, we don't need to find synonyms for it either.
However, there are many other ways researchers might refer to people between 13-19 years old besides "teens", like:
To build a more comprehensive search, we need to include those other terms. We can do this with the search operator, OR:
teens OR teenagers OR adolescents OR youth
Since we have multiple words to express the same concept, we need a way to group them together to tell the database to treat them all as pieces of the same concept. We can do this by using parentheses:
(teens OR teenagers OR adolescents OR youth)
Now we need to add this concept (teens) back into our search, which we can do with the search operator, AND:
tiktok AND anxiety AND (teens OR teenagers OR adolescents OR youth)
