Information Skills: Search first steps

Learning how to search effectively means coming up with keywords which are relevant to your topic. Keywords are usually single words or short phrases that best sum up your topic that you will enter in search boxes. They could be words in your assignment title, author's names or words related to the subject.

Keywords are not trivial words such as "of", "compare", "effect", "reaction", etc. Typing your title, complete sentences or questions into search boxes will return a lot of irrelevant information because the search will be looking for everything that contains any of those words including the trivial words!!

You will get different results depending on the words entered, the order in which they are entered, and the search engine or database you use.

This section will help you to clarify the keywords for your topic, which in turn will help save time and effort when searching for information in library databases.

If you think of many keywords before you begin your search, you'll be ready to create many different searches by combining those words in different ways. The benefit of planning your keywords out like this is to save you time in the long run, because you have set the scope of what you are trying to achieve.

The steps for coming up with appropriate keywords are:

• Break down your assignment into themes. You can then think of keywords to fit with each theme. 

• Find several synonyms (words that mean the same or similar) for each theme. Thesauri can help.

• Consider alternative keywords including broader, narrower or related terms

This short video gives an example of generating keywords from an assignment question.

Once you have identified the themes, you go through all the steps to list all the words you might need. This will mean you are saving time and effort in the long run by listing relevant keywords at the start. 

The below table lists the step involved, and an example of how this has been applied. Follow the same process for your own assignment so you get a better idea of what you really need to search for.