Globe Education Network Library / Research Guides / Search Strategies / Keyword Searching

Keyword Searching

Related Guides
 Why use keyword searching?
 How to select keywords
 Use quotation marks for phrases
 Truncation and wildcards
 Narrowing and Broadening your keywords
 Creating search strings with boolean operators

Tips! Keyword searching will search the complete bibliographic record, the text of the article, or the entire website.

  • Because of its searching breadth, it’s a perfect way to see what’s out there in the topic area.
  • Unfortunately, it’s also easy to get overwhelmed due to the large number of results.
  • Search terms need to be constructed in ways that customize your search in ways specific to your needs (see strategies for using keywords below). 

Example: Keyword searching the word "apple," will get you results about the fruit, the computer company, the Beatles (because of Apple records), books and articles written by a person with the last name "Apple," recipes for apple crisp, information about Gwyneth Paltrow's baby named Apple, etc. As you can see, keyword searching can become messy.

Keyword searching is useful when you:

    • Are using specific terminology
    • Building specific search strings
    • Need to search full text
    • Need to do any sort of broad search

Selecting Keywords

Be selective. Choose descriptive words.

Choosing keywords from your thesis

    • Example Thesis: The economic impact of the great dust storms of the 1930’s on the farmers of the great plains.
    • Keywords to Choose: economic, dust storms, 1930’s, farmers, great plains

Brainstorming keywords

Let your mind wander about your topic. Write down everything that comes to mind. This is a great way to come up with related terms.

    • Example Thesis: The economic impact of the great dust storms of the 1930’s on the farmers of the great plains.
    • Brainstorm ideas for terms: economic, economy, business, depression, dust storms, dust bowl, depression era, farmers, agricuture, over planting, wind breaks, environment, environmental disasters, wall street, the great depression, great plains, midwest, bread basket

Use quotation marks around phrases

When you're using quotation marks, you're asking the search engine or database to look for the words next to each other in that order.

Examples:

    • "right to choose"
      • Using quotation marks around phrases ensures you search for that exact phrase. If you don’t, you might find ‘total’ in the first paragraph, ‘quality in the fourth paragraph’s third sentence and ‘management’ in the last sentence of the article. Quotation marks will return results exactly as you searched for them.
    • "total quality management"

Truncation and Wildcards

These are symbols that stand in for letters. Click on the "help" button in your database or search engine to find out what the symbol is.

Examples:

    • Politic*
      • will find all the words that start with that root: politics, political, politician, politicians
    • wom?n
      • will find: woman and women

Narrowing and Broadening your keywords

Find out more about narrowing and broadening your searches.

One way to narrow or broaden your searches is by selecting narrower or broader keywords. Here are some examples:

    • Industry (broader)
    • Company (broad)
    • Sales (narrow)
    • Sales Tax (narrowest)

More examples are available to narrow or broaden your keywords.

Search Strings / Boolean Operators

Boolean Operators combine keyword search words to create "search strings." Take a look at some examples.

    • AND = narrower
    • OR = broader
    • NOT = one specific, omitting another. This will be used when a specific term could be applied to two different things, such as companies, places and people. For example, bankruptcy AND United Airlines; NOT US Airways.
 
Monday March 2, 2009