Ideas for Developing a List of Keywords
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Consider synonyms
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woman vs. female
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Consider alternate spellings
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labor vs. labour
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Consider broader and narrower terms
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Great Britain vs. England
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Homonyms. Remember databases and catalogs match characters, not concepts.
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For example, the word "China": is it a country or a set of dishes? The computer can't tell!
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Sometimes there is no universally agreed up term or phrase for a concept.
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For example, motion picture vs. movie vs. film vs. cinema.
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Avoid searching for long phrases or sentences. Extract key concepts instead.
- For example, avoid searching "How to design and implement alcoholism treatment programs" | Try instead the keywords: alcoholism and treatment
- For example, this is a screen shot from Discover Local (the library's catalog). The words in the red circle are the subject terms assigned to this book. If you were actually in Discover Local (the catalog) and looking at this record, clicking on the highlighted subject term, Japanese Americans -- Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945, would help you find more works on the same topic.
- For example, start with a person’s name or an event, rather than just the general term Civil War.
- If you can’t find anything specific, start adding more specific terms to a general search: Civil War and women, for example.
(Script for this tutorial here.)
Tips on Searching
These examples for combining keywords link to Discover Local (the catalog), but you can usually do the following operations in other databases. Other databases may use different symbols - check help screens to be sure.
Phrase search: use quotation marks in Discover Local (and in most other databases). For example:
Truncation / multiple wildcard symbol: * in Discover Local (and in most other databases). For example:
- revolution* (Will look for the words revolution, revolutions, revolutionaries, etc.)
Wildcard symbol: ? in Discover Local (and in most other databases). For example:
- wom?n (Will look for woman, women, womyn, etc.)
Combining keywords: In Discover Local, the easiest option is to use the pull down menu to combine keywords:
- AND - results will contain all words in the search box(es) / narrows your search.
- OR - results will contain at least one of the keywords typed in the search box / broadens your search.
- NOT - results will exclude a keyword. Use carefully or you will accidentally eliminate useful information just because it happens to mention the word you have after "NOT" / narrows your search.
(Script for this tutorial here.)