Most databases allow you to use the words, AND and OR in your searches known as Boolean Operators.

These terms can create a more powerful search by allowing 

You've got 3 ideas here. High schools, bullying, and the cyber nature of it.

The problem with databases and language is that we have so many different ways that we can describe the same thing. Computers have a hard time getting meaning from words, since to them they're just a series of characters. So if you search for high schools, and the author refers to them as secondary schools, you're not going to find those articles. What we do instead is take each concept, and think of lots of ways to describe it:

The advanced search field of most databases has 3 (or more) boxes that you can use in your search. I recommend using one box for all the words in each column. Just make sure you separate them with OR's. ie.

cyber or online or electronic or cell phone or email

Repeat this with each column using a new box for the words in the column. You should have something that looks like this (depending on the database):

You can see that each box is separated by a drop down menu set to 'AND'

This ensure that each concept will be included in each result. So each article will have cyber and bullying and high school present in it.

Because we've used the OR's, we know that when cyber is in an article, it could be represented by any of the words that we thought of to cover the cyber nature of this kind of bullying.

A thesaurus is an often overlooked part of many databases. Sometimes labeled simply as 'subjects' or 'descriptors' this tool can help you narrow down your topic and learn the appropriate terms and concepts for your research.

Librarians take time to learn what each item is about before they assign descriptors. Then they add descriptive information (known as "metadata"), like the author and year, as well as subject-specific descriptors (sometimes called subject terms). A thesaurus provides a list of those descriptors so that you can search for all items with the same descriptor! You can even combine descriptors for a more powerful search.

In EBSCO databases like ERIC or Academic Search Complete, the top navigation bar will have a link that reads "subject terms" and contains links to subject terms within a database. When you click on the link the database will display narrower and broader terms, you can use the checkbox next to each term to combine terms (click through each term to see more specific terms); be sure to click the "add" button at the top of the list then click search to pull up your results!

If you can't find a thesaurus term for a concept, you can still generate a list of synonyms and construct your search as before. You can just substitute subject terms from the thesaurus into those searches for those concepts, and leave the remaining ones as lists of synonyms.

Let's say in our previous example that we find bullying is a term in the thesaurus. Our search could be constructed as follows