Keywords, also commonly called search terms, are the words that you enter into the database search boxes. They represent the main concepts of your research topic and are the words used in everyday life to describe the topic. Without the right keywords, you may have difficulty finding the articles that you need.
It is very rare that your first search will bring back perfect results. It takes trial and error to determine which keywords work best for your topic. Be prepared to run multiple searches in your quest for the keywords that will help you find the materials you need.
Begin with only 2-3 essential terms and avoid long phrases. The more terms you enter the fewer results you’ll get. (For example, a search for environmental consequences of fracking may yield 0 results, while fracking environment yields over 2,000.)
Research Question: What impact does social media usage have on the self-esteem of teenagers?
Keywords: Social media, self-esteem, teenagers
After you have selected your initial search terms, list any synonyms or related terms that might be relevant to your topic.
Because the databases search for the exact words that you enter, certain types of words can be unhelpful to include in your search. These include:
relationship words: words that get at the relationship between two topics
examples: compare, contrast, correlation, causation, relationship
judgment words: words that judge something to be better or worse than something else
examples: best, worst, pro, con, advantages, disadvantages
There are many ways these ideas can be expressed or even implied. Using these words in your searches may exclude relevant articles on your topic simply because they don't include the exact word that you entered. By leaving out these words, you allow the database to find all of the articles on your main topics, which you can then evaluate to see if they fit your needs.
Once you've broken down your research topic into keywords you can start searching more in-depth using filters and other search tools. The Boolean operators AND & OR can help you combine keywords to retrieve results directly related to your topic.
AND focuses or narrows a search.
If you want to answer the question "What is the impact of advertising on smoking in adolescents?" you can combine all of your keywords with "and."
Smoking and adolescents and advertising will return results have all three keywords in the article.
OR broadens or expands a search to find all the words connected with "or." Remember that a keyword search only looks for the word you enter. OR lets you put in all possible keywords that might mean the same thing.
teenagers or adolescents finds all the articles that have either word in them. .
Most library databases have built in search tools such as filters.
Here are some useful filters:
You can also view the Advanced Search for more filters and tools!
Once a researcher locates articles on their topic, they can take their search further by looking at the references or works cited in those articles. This is called citation searching and is a way of finding relevant research in a field or subject by looking at what an article has referenced and who has since used that article as a reference. See the types of citation searching that can be done, their purposes, and the tools that can be used to do them.
This type of citation searching looks forward in time. It starts with a historical article, and searches for articles that were written AFTER the historical article -- ones that used the historical article for research.
Forward reference searching helps a researcher do the following:
This type of citation searching looks backwards in time. It starts with a current article, and searches for articles that were written BEFORE the current article. These articles were used by the authors when conducting their research on the current article.
Backward citation searching, also known as chain searching, involves identifying and examining the references or works cited in an article. It is done for the following reasons:
