Brainstorming is the process of recording all of the words that come to your mind that are in any way related to your topic.

 

For example, if our topic is child care, we might brainstorm the following terms:

These are just a few of the ideas that are related to our topic child care....  Would any of these words be useful in searching for information on our topic?   I think so! Maybe we are looking at the research question:

"What are the benefits of putting children into child care?" 

Almost all of the above words would be helpful for finding information on this topic, right?

So how can you do this yourself?  Let's take a look....