Choose important words from your research question/statement.
Brainstorm synonyms (words with similar meanings) of your keywords to create a larger list of keywords.
One way to plan your search uses a table to organize the most important terms by columns, with keywords and synonyms in rows underneath.
For "What effect does television violence have on children?" the table may look like:

This table allows you to construct one complex search query, as in this example from Academic Search Premier, a database that the UNK Library subscribes to.

See the next box for information on those asterisks.