Keywords
Our library databases have great resources, including thousands of peer-reviewed articles. However, the databases are very particular about the words you enter. The results will contain the words exactly how you spelled them. For example, a search for "political" will not find books or articles that say "politics" or "politicians" instead.
Also, sometimes the words researchers use are not words that we would use in our everyday life. That is why it is really important to brainstorm possible keywords before you start searching.
Not finding what you need? Check sources you already have for possible keywords.
Check with a librarian or your professor for additional suggestions.
Boolean Words
Boolean words allow you to either reduce the number of results or expand it by either requiring certain keywords, excluding certain keywords, or allowing for alternative words. In library databases, these are AND, OR, and NOT. You can usually just type these in, but many of our databases also have drop-down menu options.
Boolean AND
Using the word AND means that both search terms will be required to be in the results. Most of our databases do this automatically.
For example, 1 would be all articles about "Climate Change" and 2 would be all of the articles about the Pacific. The yellow area in the middle would be the results that have both search terms.
Boolean OR
The Boolean word OR lets you search for synonyms or related terms at the same time, which is very helpful! Google may do this automatically, but our databases do not. So, you can search for "Climate Change" OR "Global Warming" and get more results.
Boolean NOT
Sometimes it is helpful to exclude certain words if you are getting a lot of results that aren't about your topic. For example, if you did a search for "Climate Change" AND Pacific, but you are getting a lot of results about the Pacific Northwest, you can say NOT northwest.
Phrase Searching
You can search for specific phrases by using quotation marks. This works in both Google and our databases. This is very helpful, because otherwise, your keywords could be anywhere in the webpage or article.
Truncation
So, our databases and our catalog are picky about what you type in. What can you do?
Truncation allows you to use a symbol, for our catalog and most databases it is an asterisk *, to search for various endings of words. So, a search for climat* will find climate, climatology, climates, climatic, etc.
Narrow Down Your Topic
You can narrow down a topic through the 6 questions:
- Who?
- What?
- When?
- Where?
- Why?
- So What? (Historical significance of the event)