This reference is written in the Harvard referencing style.
Natural and academic language
Use a mixture of natural and academic language as these will appear in the title and abstracts of papers. For example, teenager has a lot of synonyms so a variety of alternative words can be used including teen, young person, young adult, adolescents, adolescence etc.
Subject headings
Subject headings are umbrella terms used by some databases to describe content or information. Articles are assigned a number of subject headings by indexers on behalf of the databases. It is a great method of searching for relevant literature related to your topic.
Phrase searching
Most databases use double quotation marks (“…”) to search for phrases. This is useful when you want to find results where the words appear together to make up a phrase, for example, "cognitive behavioural therapy" or “heart attack”.
Truncation
Many databases use the asterisk (*) as a truncation command. When used at the end of a keyword, it will instruct the database to search the root of the word and retrieve results with various endings, for example, disease* will find disease, diseases and diseased. Using truncation can be useful when searching for plurals.
Databases can use different syntax so it’s worth checking the Help menu of each resource. You can also ask your subject librarian for help with this.