Psychology Honors Research: Developing Search Strategies

I want to know if having young adults keep a daily diary is an effective method to identify triggers for excessive alcohol consumption.

1. Identify key concepts: daily diary; excessive alcohol consumption; young adults
   • Key concepts may be things like populations, experimental methods, interventions, outcomes, or exposures/environments.
     • population: young adults
     • experimental method: daily diary
     • phenomenon: excessive alcohol consumption
2. Generate synonyms and terms to express those concepts in different ways: heavy drinking, binge drinking, alcohol use disorder.
3. Consider putting quotation marks around exact phrases that you want to find in titles or abstracts: "alcohol use"
4. Consider using APA Thesaurus terms to find articles about your concept: DE "Diary Measure"    
5. Each concept can be held within a set of parentheses, using OR to find articles mentioning any of the terms listed for the concept: ("daily diary" OR DE "Diary Measure")
6. Combine your key concepts using AND so each article retrieved by the database has to mention each concept:
   ("daily diary" OR DE "Diary Measure")
   AND
   ("heavy drinking" OR "binge drinking" OR "alcohol use disorder" OR DE "Alcohol Abuse")
   AND
   ("young adults" OR "young adulthood")
   Note: to search for age groups, it is most effect to use the Age Group filter rather than relying on age-related phrases to appear in titles and abstracts.
7. Review results. Look for terms or concepts to expand or focus your search strategy.
8. Consider applying filters, such as Age (young adults), Source Type (journal articles), or Methodology (empirical studies, review articles).