Choose Search Terms (Don't Just Type Your Question)
Key Takeaways:
- Use keywords instead of natural language
- Choose words that have to show up in your ideal resource.
How many pages of results will you look through with your typical Google search?
Most students say that they go through the first page, maybe the second. Overachievers will look at the third, but the typical Google search has thousands of results. How can you make sure that the best results show up at the very top? This video will help.
Click here for transcript.
Are you still searching Google by typing in your entire topic and hoping for the best?
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Do you use the same search strategy in library databases and give up, thinking there are no scholarly articles on your topic?
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You can do better! Maybe you’ve only heard of Boolean operators, like And, Or, and Not, but have
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used them, thinking they’re some old-school pre-Google ancient form of searching. In research, though, they’re your friends!
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Think of it this way: let’s say I want a date this weekend. I go to my online dating account and say I want a date who lives in my
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neighborhood AND likes to play darts AND writes poetry. Do you think I would have a lot of options for my date this weekend?
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Let’s say I lower my standards a little. And I say, OK, I just want someone who lives in my neighborhood OR plays darts OR writes
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poetry. I probably would have more potential dates to choose from, right? It’s the same thing with scholarly articles!
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Here I am in the Academic Search Elite database, looking for articles on my topic “the effects of the media on teenage girls’ body
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image”. I break my topic into its main concepts: “media”, “body image” and “teenage girls” to make my keywords.
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I enter each keyword into separate boxes, separated by AND because I want all my articles to have all these terms.
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Remember how I got more dates, though? I broadened my search by using the word OR. In this case, I want to think of related
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keywords for each of my concepts and separate them with OR. “Body image” or “self esteem”, “teenage girls or adolescent girls”.
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Authors might use different words than you do to describe the same thing and you want to find as many relevant articles as you can.
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Now I have some more results.
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You can also try clicking on a relevant article to look at its Subject Terms. See if there is a term you haven't thought of and copy and
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paste it to your search and maybe you’ll get a few more results.
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You can also narrow your search by using the word NOT to eliminate terms in your results. In this database, I’m going to add a row,
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change AND to NOT and enter in the term I want to eliminate. Let’s say I’m not interested in eating disorders.
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That narrowed my search a bit. There’s no magic number for search results, but you want a manageable number
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that you can sort through to find the ones that are going to be most useful in your assignment.
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You probably noticed I didn’t include the word “effects” in my search. Lots of people use this as a keyword, but in reality, it’s too vague
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to be useful. It can add irrelevant articles to your search or eliminate relevant ones like it did to mine. Stick to your most concrete
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concepts for the best results.
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Ask yourself, “could this keyword be a topic on its own?”
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Even in Google, you can do more effective searching than just typing in your whole topic in the search box. Take a look at this
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infographic. It shows other useful ways to narrow and broaden your search using common symbols.
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And don’t forget to use Command (or Control) + F to make it easier to find your search terms.
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If you need more help coming up with a good search strategy, don’t hesitate to ask a librarian.
Don’t use natural language. Figure out what your topic is and use only the key terms.
Every word matters in a search
If you include words that are not important to your topic, a search engine like Google or a library database will still search for them.
Example of an ineffective search:
What are occupational hazards of medical professionals?
Example of an effective search:
occupational hazards medical professionals
Word order matters
Blue sky gives different results than sky blue. Make sure not to separate key ideas but put your most important concept first.
Here are the Google image search results for blue sky. Images of the sky.
Here are the search results for sky blue. Color palettes.
Word choice matters as well
Library databases and search engines find information resources by searching for your search terms in the title, abstract, subjects that have been assigned(think hashtags), and sometimes the full text of the item. If they do not find your search term in any of these places, they will not return that item as a result.
For better results think about the language that would be used in the type of source you want. For example education experts might use the term “academic performance” to express the concept of “better grades”. So a search for better grades, might not find relevant articles if that concept was expressed as academic performance instead. Similarly if you search for a resource about phones and grades using the keyword iPhones, but the author never users the term iPhone and only uses the term smartphones, then that perfect article will not appear in your search results.
Tip: Don't know what terms experts would use to talk about a subject. Try searching your topic in Google. A Google search for "Do poor people get different medical treatment?" brings up articles that mention the terms health care and low income. Another search mentions medical disparities and under-served populations all which are "expert" terms for the same topic.
This really important paper would not show up in the results of a search for students and better grades because it never uses the term "better grades".
Check your comprehension
