Search Strategy & Keywords
When conducting research online, keywords are important! They determine whether your results will be relevant to your topic. Utilize these steps to help strategize your search.
Step 1: Describe your topic
Clearly state your topic in one or two sentences. Try to be as specific as possible.
- Example: I want to investigate the use of online social networks and how it affects cheating in colleges.
Step 2: identify your main concepts
Go back to Step 1 and indicate your key or main concepts by underlining, circling, or highlighting them in your topic sentence(s).
- Example: I want to investigate the use of online social networks and how it affects cheating in colleges.
step 3: list your main concepts to determine clear, concise keywords
List your main concepts and any synonyms or word variations.
Keywords for Concept 1
- online social networks
- social media
- Facebook*
Keywords for Concept 2
- cheating
- plagiarism
- academic dishonesty
Keywords for Concept 3
- colleges
- universities
- higher education
Step 4: Determine the best resources
Research requires you to find information from a variety of resources. Determining which resources are most useful for your needs will depend on your topic and the requirements of the assignment.
- Review your assignment requirements. List any special considerations, such as information must be from a particular time period.
- What specific resources does your assignment require? Does it restrict the use of particular resources(for example, Wikipedia or other websites)? Do you have to use peer-reviewed journal articles? Can you use trade publications or other sources?
Step 5: search the library databases
Use the keywords identified in your search strategy worksheet to begin searching in the library databases and/or with online search engines (like Google and Google Scholar) for
articles and websites (if permitted).
- Combine your keywords to conduct simple searches. Switch up your keywords to retrieve different results.
- social media AND cheating AND college
- Facebook AND plagiarism AND universities
- social networks AND cheating AND college
- This search is more complex, but you can conduct fewer searches by connecting your keywords for each concept with the Boolean operator OR and enclosed by parentheses. Then, connect the OR sets with the Boolean operator AND.
- (“online social networks” OR “social media”) AND (cheating OR plagiarism OR “academic dishonesty”) AND (colleges OR universities)
Here is another Example…
TOPIC: What are the effects of school nutrition on childhood obesity?
KEYWORDS: “school nutrition” and “childhood obesity”
RELATED KEYWORDS: children | “school lunches” | cafeteria | exercise | “health risks” | food | poverty
Pro-Tip
If you have any phrases, use quotation marks to search the keywords together. This will ensure the keywords appear next to each other and often bring more accurate results, however be sure to spell everything correctly and keep the phrases short.
CAUTION
If you type a full question into a search box with lots of filler words, the database or search engine may not be intuitive and thus return irrelevant results.