When searching for a phrase (social anxiety, business ethics, etc.) it can be helpful to put the phrase in quotation marks so that the database knows to look for the words as a phrase ("social anxiety", "business ethics", etc.)
While this may not be important for a paper or assignment that requires only a handful of sources at most, you will find that for larger projects it's critical to keep track of your research "path." As such, it can be helpful to develop the habit from the beginning with your smaller searches.
Tracking your research can look like a number of things. For example, if you use a citation manager like Zotero, you may note in the entry for the article what your query looked like in order to retrieve it.
Alternatively, you may log the search in an Excel spreadsheet and track which articles it yielded below.
This is important as, especially with larger projects, it is helpful to know what combinations you have already tried, and what kinds of results they yielded.
This serves the additional purpose of making it easier to find an article again if you forget to save one.
How can you translate your research problem to an effective query?
Don't just put your entire research problem into Discovery's basic search function as a phrase. Instead, try to break it down into its core concepts.
If your research problem is "how does cognitive behavioural therapy support children with social anxiety", your search might look like this:
In this example, we have taken the core concepts (cognitive behavioural therapy, social anxiety or anxiety, and children) from the research problem, and used Discovery's advanced search function to put them each in their own box.
The reasons we do this are so that each component can be individually manipulated. It allows us to switch certain elements from keywords to subject terms, permits us to input and adjust more visible Boolean strings (like in the case of social anxiety OR anxiety), and allows us to keep track of all of the components of the search with ease.
For example, if a similar search were to be written out in the basic search, it would look like this:
As you can see, this is more visually complex to keep track of all of the components and does not allow for only certain elements to be subject terms while others remain keywords. In fact, the basic search does not allow for any of the items to be set to subject terms. The three options are keyword, author, and title.