Competency - Building Block Search

For this competency I searched LibLit for my topic: high school libraries, research skills, and problems with plagiarism.

Facets: High School, research, plagiarism (I did not include librar* since I was searching in LibLit).
Terms for facet (synonyms): high school, middle school, secondary school, research, search*, paper, plagiarism, cheating, dishonesty.

Building Block Search:
S1: high school or middle school or secondary school = 3,351 records
S2: research or search or paper = 39,039 records
S3: plagiarism or cheating or dishonesty = 210 records
S4: S1 + S2 + S3 = 5 records

The 5 records retrieved were:
Cooper, J. Patchwork Plagiarism. Knowledge Quest v. 35 no. 4 (March/April 2007) p. 62-5
Callison, D. Plagiarism. School Library Media Activities Monthly v. 22 no. 4 (December 2005) p. 41-5
McGregor, J. H., et. al., Appropriate use of information at the secondary school level: Understanding and avoiding plagiarism. Library & Information Science Research v. 27 no. 4 (2005) p. 496-512
Minkel, W. Sniffing out the cheaters. School Library Journal v. 48 no. 6 (June 2002) p. 25
Williamson, K., et. al., Information Seeking and Use by Secondary Students: The Link between Good Practice and the Avoidance of Plagiarism. School Library Media Research v. 10 (2007) p. 1-22
All were available as Full Text articles and all were extremely relevant to my query needs.

I had never used this strategy and while you have to put a little more work into it at the start (thinking of facets, synonyms, etc), the time is well spent because the end result (5 very relevant records or hits) pays big dividends in that you are able to find valuable information fairly quickly and get on with the next stage of your research. Without this strategy, it would have taken much longer to find relevant information and much time would have been wasted in wading through irrelevant records.