Using Smart Search Strategies

Keywords

Keywords or search terms are necessary when searching library databases. Whereas you can type an entire sentence into Google and still get thousands of results, a library database will likely return you zero!  Instead you must use keywords or specific search terms in order to retrieve the best results.

There are two main steps to identifying keywords. Take a look at the following example.

Example Research Question: Should college athletes get paid?

Step 1. Identify the main concepts in your research question. These are often the who, what, where, when, why words in your topic.

Main concepts: college, athletes, and paid

Step 2. Make a list of alternate keywords or other search terms based on your main concepts. These are often synonyms, or different words that mean the same thing. Since you are searching in an academic database, which usually contains a high percentage of scholarly content (information written by experts for experts), consider how your instructor or another expert might describe the topic (e.g. heart attacks are often called myocardial infarction in academic writing). Are there any technical terms that you might not be aware of? Another way to determine good keywords is to look at vocabulary these authors are using and use similar terms in your search.

Keywords for college: college, collegiate, university, post secondary school, etc.

Athletes: athletes, athletics, sports, players, football players, basketball players, etc.

Paid: paid, pay, compensation, scholarships, stipend, etc.

Most databases will also have an Index or Subject Heading feature. Think of subject headings as the official hashtags of an article. Subject headings are like categories or labels assigned to articles based on their content and can be used effectively to find subject-specific results.   

Image Source: Nixon, B. (Creator). (2009). What is research: Initial thoughts from PRCA 4330 [Wordle]. Retrieved from: http://publicrelationsmatters.com/tag/research-wordle/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Boolean Operators (And, Or, Not)

Once you have identified your keywords, you can begin to enter your search terms into the search box(es). Since you usually have multiple concepts that you want to include (e.g. college, athletes, and paid), you can use Boolean operators to connect them.

In a library database, you can control your results by connecting keywords with Boolean Operators, the words AND, OR, and NOT.

• Use AND to narrow your results. Your results must include ALL of your terms (e.g. college AND athletes).
• Use OR to broaden your results. This is a good way to use your synonyms. Your results could include ANY of the terms (e.g. college OR university). 

• Use NOT to exclude terms from your results (e.g. athletes NOT professional).

If you are doing an Advanced Search with multiple rows of search boxes, you can use all of these together:

 

Additional Search Strategies

There are several other search strategies that you can use to narrow or expand your search results. These may work slightly differently depending on the database you are searching, but the most common strategies are shown here. If you have any questions about using these or any other of the search strategies discussed on this page during your research, contact a librarian at Grossmont College Links to an external site., and we'll be happy to help you!

	Quotations
	Quotations are used to combine keywords into a keyword phrase. This is sometimes called phrase searching. This is particularly useful in narrowing your results. By putting quotes around two or more words, they will have to appear in that exact sequence. E.g. “college athletes” will return results that use that exact phrase.
	Truncation
	Truncation uses an asterisk (*) to leave a word open to variant endings. Putting an asterisk at the end of a root word will retrieve all forms of that word.  E.g. athlet* will return results that include athletes, athlete, athletic, athletics, and any other athlet___ words.
	Question Mark Wildcard The question mark (?) wildcard is used to replace an unknown character within a word. The database will return all words with the ? replaced by a letter. E.g. wom?n will return results for both woman and women.
	Google Domain Search There are a series of Google-specific search strategies you can use. One helpful strategy is to limit domain types (.edu, .gov, etc.) using the site: operator. This can be used for a specific website, as well as across domain types. E.g. college athletes site:.edu will return results from only .edu types of sites. E.g. college athletes site:grossmont.edu will return results from only the Grossmont College website. Check out this page for more information on searching in Google (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..