Doing Research: Tips for Keyword Searches

- BEGIN WITH YOUR TOPIC -

TOPIC: Eating disorders in teen athletes and the effects on their performance.

IDENTIFY THE KEYWORDS: eating disorders, teen, athletes, performance.

Note: in this example, the word effects is not needed since any article about eating disorders in athletes will likely address the resulting problems.

THINK OF ALTERNATE KEYWORDS TO TRY:

Instead of eating disorders - bulimia, anorexia, or binge eating.

Instead of performance - stamina, strength, or endurance.

Instead of teen - adolescent

- QUOTATION MARKS FOR PHRASES -

Whenever you have a two-word phrase, do this:

"eating disorders" "binge eating"

Then the database will search for those two words in that order next to each other.

- USE * TO CAPTURE DIFFERENT ENDINGS OF A WORD -

Known as a truncation symbol or sometimes a wildcard, use the asterisk * like this:

teen*

Then the database will find and retrieve all endings of that root word: teen, teens, teenager, teenagers, teenage, teenaged.

- PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER -

Just three of the possible combinations for this example:

"eating disorders" athletes teen* performance

bulimia athletes adolescent stamina

"binge eating" athletes teen* performance

- THE NEXT LEVEL -

Sometimes, depending on your topic, you will need to take your keyword searching to the next level to get the best search results and this involves the use of Boolean operators, or commands.  The three operators are:

AND OR NOT

TOPIC: How can trans and nonbinary people manage anxiety and build self esteem?

IDENTIFY THE KEYWORDS: trans, nonbinary, manage, anxiety, self esteem

THINK OF ALTERNATIVE KEYWORDS TO TRY: transgender

PROBLEM: The population in question is known by many different names.

SOLUTION: Use the OR operator.

- A BOOLEAN ENHANCED SEARCH -

(trans OR transgender OR nonbinary) AND manag* AND anxiety AND "self esteem"

NOTE: Always use ( ) with OR.  Use all caps for the operators.

HOW THIS SEARCH WORKS: First, the database searches for all occurrences of the words trans, transgender, or nonbinary.  Next, it searches for anyplace where at least one of those words occur along with any form of manage (manages, management, managed), also anxiety, and self esteem.

- NOT -

This Boolean operator doesn't get used frequently, but it's great if you need it.  Here's a good example, if your topic has to do with Mexico the country and you don't want to get search results for New Mexico, the state, you can do this:

Mexico AND culture NOT new