We tend to start searching without thinking about what exactly we need to find. Many of us simply enter a search topic (such as "homelessness") in a search box and then go through the top search results. When we search like this, the search results are often all over the place and we have to spend a lot of time going through irrelevant search results.
When doing online searches, you are actually searching the indexed keywords of a database or search engine. The database or search engine will try to match the keywords from its index with the keywords you enter in the search box. Therefore, your search keywords will determine your search results.
Let's learn how to identify and choose appropriate keywords for online searches.
To identify appropriate keywords, you need to think of your research topic and your focus. You can start with a simple topic focus (e.g. the impacts of bullying on teenagers), a research question (e.g. How nanotechnology is used in medicine?), or refer to your research paper outline or assignment guideline. Then follow these steps:
1. Identify the concepts related to you research topic. For example:
Topic: Debate on assisted suicide
Keywords: assisted suicide, medical ethics, right to die, terminal illnesses
2. List descriptive or alternative terms for each concept you want to explore. For example:
assisted suicide: physician-assisted suicide, assisted dying, assisted death
terminal illness: incurable disease, suffering, pain...
3. Broaden or narrow your search terms. Some concepts are too broad for searching relevant resources while some are too narrow and yield few or no results. Adjust your searches by using a broader term or a narrower (more specific) term depending on the search results. For example,
Broad term: "learning disabilities"
Narrower term : "reading disabilities"
Narrower term: "dyslexia"
4. Choose appropriate terms that are most likely to appear in the source you want to use. For example,
“teenagers” or "teens" - likely to appear in magazine articles
"youth" or “adolescents” - often used in scholarly articles.
5. Group the keywords to make it easier for combining them for searches. For example:
6. Pick up more relevant search terms from search results by looking at the subject terms assigned to a relevant article or book. Browsing titles and abstracts (summaries) of the search results can also give you ideas for new keywords for searches.
Once you have identified appropriate keywords, you can combine different keywords for a more focused search. Click on the "Advanced Search Techniques" tab to learn how to combine keywords for searches.