Before building your search, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What information are you looking for? Consider stating this in writing in two or three sentences.
2. Identify general concepts about the information that you're looking for, and ask how they might relate to the search terms that you might use.
3. Are you interested in a specific author's work? If so, then that might be a very good place to start. You might use articles by this author to discover other relevant documents to satisfy your research needs.
4. Are there specific journals that publish articles related to your subject? You might want to take a look at the Serials Source Lists attached to each database's factsheet (the factsheet appears as an '?' button next to each database).
5. After you've located a couple of relevant documents, consider using the descriptors attached to the record to locate similar records.
6. Need further assistance? Talk to your institution's reference librarian!