Basic Search Planning
•Decide exactly what your topic is and what results you expect to   achieve. 
•Write a one-sentence description of the topic.  Ask yourself, “What would be the title of the perfect article?”
•Determine what individual concepts are within the topic’s description.
 
•For each of the concepts, think of alternative words or synonyms.
•As you work through steps 2 and 3, ask yourself: what words must a record contain in order to be relevant?  
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•Perform the search, one concept at a time. 
This is another of those slides that I borrowed from DIALOG.  It’s a pretty good review of the last slide, but in my opinion they should stress the use of reference sources to help with determining what individual concepts are within the topic’s description and to help with choosing synonyms or related/narrower/broader terms.  The question “What words must a record contain in order to be relevant?” is fantastic.  Athletes often visualize what they try to do in practice – librarians should do the same with database searching.