Identifying Keywords
Well-planned keywords can give you the best chance of finding relevant information by clarifying what it is you are searching for. They allow you to capture results you might otherwise have missed, and can help broaden or narrow your search to give you the best results.
Begin by identifying your key words or concepts:
- Look for the main concepts or themes in your topic.
- Brainstorm a list of keywords or synonyms for each concepts. Consider different ways to express the same concepts.
- Combine these ideas and adapt them using the search techniques below.
Adapting your search to get better results
Watch the following short video to learn how to search more effectively:
Boolean searching
Boolean operators enable you to link concepts together in your search, or to distinguish them from each other. The main operators are AND, OR and NOT:.
- AND - will narrow your search to results that include both terms
- OR - will broaden your search to results that include either term
- NOT - will exclude terms from your results
Truncation and Wildcards
- Truncation uses an asterisk (*) to tell a database you want all variations of a particular word-stem.
- Searching for music* will return results for music, musician, musicians, musical, musicals, musicality, etc.
- The asterisk can be placed anywhere within the word to denote the word-stem. Other examples could be
- creat* (create/creativity/creation/creative/creator)
- perform* (perform/performer/performance/performative)
- identi* (identity/identify/identification)
- therap* (therapy/therapies/therapist)
- Wildcards often use a question mark (?) to search for alternative spellings.
- Examples include
- organi?ation
- wom?n
Phrase Searching
- Many databases and library catalogues will search for exact phrases if they are put inside quotation marks ("...").
- Phrase searching is effective because it will only return results where the exact phrase is included.
- Phrases could be
- Names ("John Hughes"; "Johann Sebastian Bach"; "Jason Robert Brown")
- Titles of works ("The Lord of the Rings"; "New World Symphony"; "Fun Home")
- Concepts or expressions particular to your discipline ("research methods"; "music therapy"; "queer dramaturgy")
The images below illustrate how this is effective using "research methods" as a phrase - note the number of results in the bottom left corner:
Searching without quotation marks:
Searching with quotation marks:
