A concept map helps you identify keywords (and their variants) that different authors use when writing and publishing on your topic.

You can create it as a table, diagram or other visual representation that shows the terms and the relationships between them. It will help you refine your search strategy and decide which filters to apply to retrieve relevant results.

Create your concept map

You can create your concept map using pen and paper or digital tools such as Visio (Microsoft 365), Google Drawings or draw.io.

1) Summarise your topic in a single sentence. E.g.: “How social media influences young teenagers and political polarisation“.

2) Highlight the keywords in your sentence and look for synonyms and both broader and more specific variations. E.g.: “How social media influences young teenagers and political polarisation“. 

• Social media (generic): Social networks, Online platforms, Digital platforms
• Social media (specific): TikTok, video-sharing platforms, Instagram, Twitter, X
• Influence: influence, impact, effect, role, contribution
• Young adolescents (generic): adolescents, teenagers, youth, young people
• Young adolescents (specific): Gen Z, digital natives, young teens, secondary school students
• Political polarisation (generic): political polarisation, ideological polarisation, partisan division
• Political polarisation (specific): ideological extremism, echo chambers, filter bubbles, political tribalism 

3) Add filters if you need them:

• Geographical scope: which countries or regions?
• Time frame: Do you need the studies to be from the last 10 years, or perhaps the last 5 years?

4) Organise the terms into a diagram or table, showing the relationships between them (e.g., topic ↔ population ↔ phenomenon ↔ platform). This will help you to combine terms later using Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT) and to decide on filters (date, language, document type, geographical area).

The IQS Library offers you a range of information sources that allow you to carry out simple and advanced searches and access high-quality academic and scientific information:

Discovery URL

A portal to all IQS Library resources. It allows you to:

• Borrow books from the IQS Library and other libraries at Universitat Ramon Llull and the CSUC
• Access to e-books
• Access to digital journal articles and book chapters
• Access to undergraduate and master’s theses

Learn how to Loan documents  and   Request digital articles or book chapters

Specialist websites

Websites and repositories containing specialist publications and data that can be consulted, read or downloaded:

School of Engineering

• SciFinder
• NCBI
• Royal Society of Chemistry
• European Pharmacopoeia
• PubMed
• Ullmann’s Encyclopedia

School of Management

• SABI
• Business Source Elite
• Emerald
• ITC Market Analysis Tools

Find links to these and other tools in our list of  Resources

Scientific databases

Platforms that group publications by discipline and provide impact metrics, such as the number of citations received, normalised citations or percentiles.

Web of Science    Scopus

Have you found an article or a chapter from a book and don’t know how to download it? Access it through our Discovery

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Once your concept map is ready, use the keywords and combine them with Boolean operators and other search techniques to find more relevant results.

Search techniques

All modern search engines offer the same advanced search techniques and options, which are explained below:

• Exact phrase: Use quotation marks (” “) to search for phrases as a single unit. E.g. “social media” (this prevents ‘social’ and ‘media’ from being searched for separately).
• Boolean operators: These allow you to combine or exclude terms. There are three different operators:
  • AND: the results must include both terms.
  • OR: the results must include at least one of the terms.
  • NOT: the results must not include the specified term.

• Parentheses: Use parentheses to group terms for comprehensive searches. Ex.: (“social media” OR TikTok OR Instagram) AND (teenagers OR adolescents).
• Truncation: Retrieve variants that share a common root by adding an asterisk (*). Ex.: biochem* → biochemistry, biochemical.
• Filters: Apply filters to limit or exclude results by: publication date, subject, language, open access, document type, geographic area, etc. Use them to narrow down and tailor the results to your needs.

Create several search formulas

1. Start with a general search by combining generic terms with OR and distinct concepts with AND.
   Ex.: (“social media” OR “online platforms”) AND (teenagers OR adolescents) AND “political polarization”
2. Refine based on the results: incorporate more specific terms, add filters, and, if necessary, filter out irrelevant results using “NOT.”
   Ex.: (“social media” OR TikTok) AND (adolescents OR “Gen Z”) AND (“echo chambers” OR “filter bubbles”) NOT marketing

Make the most of the bibliography (“indirect” search)

In addition to keyword searches, you can find relevant documents by reviewing the references cited in key articles you’re reading (backward searching or indirect/secondary information). You can also look at the citations a paper receives (forward searching) to find more recent studies along the same lines.

Toda la información que utilices en tu texto final debe estar debidamente citada. Indica qué ideas o datos proceden de otros documentos y menciona la publicación correspondiente. Si no lo haces, el lector puede asumir que toda la información es de autoría propia, apropiándote de trabajo ajeno. Esto constituye plagio, una mala praxis que puede conllevar la suspensión del trabajo y supone un grave descrédito académico.

All information you use in your final paper must be properly cited. Indicate which ideas or data come from other sources and cite the corresponding publication. If you fail to do so, the reader may assume that all the information is your own work, implying that you have appropriated someone else’s work. This constitutes plagiarism, a serious violation that can result in suspension from the program and brings significant academic discredit.

Guide: Citing Documents

Reference Managers

At the IQS Library, we offer training and support for Mendeley and Zotero, two reference management tools that allow you to:

• Save and organize references and documents (PDFs) in your personal library
• Insert citations and automatically generate bibliographies in Word, with the option to change the citation style with a single click.