• Looking for articles written ABOUT research methods? (ie. critiques and reviews of research methodologies; how-tos and best practices) Search for the name of the method in the Subject/Descriptor field (may want to use the database's thesaurus to find the term that database uses).
• Looking for research articles that used a certain research method to collect data? Search for the name of the method in the Keyword field.

Example:

Looking for articles discussing interpretation of focus group data?- search for "focus group" or "focus groups" in Subject/Descriptor field

Looking for a research article that used focus groups to collect data? - search for "focus group" or "focus groups" in Keyword field

• State your research topic as a thesis statement or a question:
  the effects of unemployment on domestic violence
• Identify the separate concepts that make up your topic; put phrases in quotation marks:
  unemployment; "domestic violence"
• Make a list of search terms for each concept. Be sure to include synonyms, related terms, and terms that may be broader or narrower:
  unemployment:  unemployed, jobless, "employment status"
  "domestic violence":  "family violence", "child abuse", "intimate abuse"

Based on your list(s) of search terms, devise your search strategy:

• use quotation marks to group two or more words into phrases:
  "drug use", "drug abuse", "illegal drugs"
• use boolean operator OR; this tells the computer to search for all the terms at the same time:
  unemployment or jobless; "domestic violence" or "family violence"

    unemployment or jobless

• use boolean operator AND; this tells the computer to restrict retrieval to both concepts:
  unemployment and "domestic violence"

unemployment and "domestic violence"

• use truncation (*) to broaden your search to include variants of a term:
  unemploy* will retrieve unemployed, unemployment, unemployable