For each of the concepts identified, the vocabulary is enriched by listing synonyms or equivalent terms. For this purpose, consider:

• Spelling and grammatical variants (e.g. plural)
• Acronyms (more than 3 letters)
• Words of the same family
• The translation of terms into English, as scholarly literature is often published in this language.

To properly structure your thoughts, it is useful to include these key words in a concept plan.

The concept plan is a thinking tool independent of the research tool used. It helps you organize your ideas and track high-performance keywords.

Use a concept-plan

To help identify key words, consulting general or specialized dictionaries as well as encyclopedias or other reference works is very useful:

• Keywords from the Aciège Management Thesaurus
• Reference works in KOHA, the Media Library catalog, for more completeness.

In the concept plan, identify the key words having the same beginning of character strings. The majority of search tools offer the search functionality called  truncation *  which is very useful for broadening the search to all words with the same root.

Ex.: Petrol* marks Petrol, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Petrolatum, Petroleum.

It is also interesting to identify in the concept plan the key words that are to be searched for as an exact expression. The majority of search tools offer this search functionality by framing expressions with English quotation marks  " ". Exact search allows you to locate words exactly in the requested order, without separating them.

Some other tips to know:

• Case and accents generally have no impact
• Google does a synonym search by default.
• The * operator in Google replaces a complete word. There is no operator to apply truncation in Google.
• Some search tools offer the mask (?) which replaces one or zero characters. Ex: Behavior drafts Behavior and Behavior
• For more details on whether or not truncation or masking exists in the tool used, always consult the online help for that search tool.

Now that the ideas are well organized in the concept plan, we must understand the logical operators that link the key words together. This is what step 3 is about!