Skip to Main Content
Research Guides

Brainstorm Terms

Research is vocabulary driven. So think creatively about all possible terms, both broad and narrow, to use in your searches.

Concepts for "Information seeking":

  • Information seeking behavior/behaviour
  • information use
  • information retrieval
  • information needs
  • information verification
  • information evaluation
  • search strategies/techniques/methods
  • user behavior/behaviour

Find Information on Your User Group

Brainstorm terms for the population you've selected. Some examples:

• Lawyers OR attorneys OR counsel OR legal profession, etc

• Teachers OR educators OR professors OR instructors, etc

• Undergraduates OR college students OR millennials OR generation y OR net generation, etc

 

Use both broad and narrow terms. If you're specifically researching the information behavior of pregnant women, you'll also want to search for how women seek information on health care in general.

 

To find background information on standard occupations, use the Occupational Outlook Handbook. If your user group is not covered in this source, consider finding background information in an encyclopedia.