Searching With Keywords¶

When you are searching in library databases, it is important to only enter keywords instead of full sentences.

Keywords are the most important words in your research question or topic. For example, let's say you want to know whether there was any correlation between exercise and positive body image among teens.

The most important words in that sentence are exercise, body image, and teens. So those are your keywords.

Next, we want to connect our keywords together to focus and narrow our search. We do that through the word AND.

Narrow Your Search With AND¶

When you want to find results that mention all of your keywords, there is a special trick. If you put AND between each keyword, it tells the database that you only want results that have all the keywords - not two of them, not one of them, but all of them.

The image below illustrates the principle at play. What we want are the sources at the center of the graphic; the ones with all three keywords.

Narrow Your Search With Exact Phrases¶

If a keyword (such as body image) is a multiword phrase, then you will want to do an exact phrase search by putting it in quotation marks. Searching for "body image" tells the database that you want those words together and in that order. Otherwise, it will search for the words body and image separately.

Therefore, with that change, our search will be:

Expand Your Search With Truncation¶

What if there was an article titled "The Impact of Exercise on the Body Image of a Typical Teenager"? This article wouldn't show up in our results because we are searching for teens not teenager.

When a keyword has several variations or is commonly used in both singular and plural, you may want to truncate the keyword with an asterisk (*). This will expand your results.

For example, searching for teen* will show results with teenagers, teenager, teen, teenaged, etc.

See It In Action¶

Please watch this short video (01:30 min) to see it in action. A transcript of the video is also provided for you.