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Synonyms & Related Concepts

Did your initial keyword search yield fewer results that you hoped? Do you want to find more sources? If so, consider adding synonyms and related concepts to your search.

Not everyone thinks and speaks alike, and that is okay. One person might say "I'm brown haired" while another might say "I'm a brunette." Some people say "soda" and others say "pop."

Sometimes things are not literally the same thing but can function as synonyms in a certain context. When heading out to a yoga class, one person might say "I'm going to yoga" while another might say "I'm going to exercise." Exercise and yoga are not the exact same thing, but neither person is wrong in how they spoke because the terms overlap and are related.

Examples

Let's look at the search we developed earlier in this training:

Example

exercise AND "body image" AND teen*


Each of those keywords have multiple alternatives. For example:

  • exercise =
    • workout
    • PE
    • "physical education"
    • sports
  • body image =
    • self perception
    • self regard
    • self worth
    • sense of worth
  • teen* =
    • adolescent
    • young adult

Can you come up with anymore? A thesaurus may help, or you may want to read a basic encyclopedia article on the topic.

Tip

Sometimes librarians and instructors will say "synonyms" as a shorthand, but you should use both exact synonyms and also related concepts.

We know that physical education is not an exact synonym for exercise, but they overlap enough to be useful alternative terms in our search.


The Challenge

In everyday conversation, humans are very good at understanding conversations when different people use different vocabularies. The challenge comes when researching. Computers aren't nearly as good at identifying context and extrapolating different, appropriate vocabulary words from your keywords.

So, how do we search for sources when various authors may be using different words than our keywords? Fortunately, we can use another Boolean operator to create an advanced search; this advanced search will tell the database what other synonyms you want to search.

OR

Remember how we used AND to combine all the different concepts we wanted to find? Well, we can use OR in a similar way to broaden our search results.

Instead of combining terms like AND does, OR tells the database you want any of the options.

Tip

You do not need to include every possible synonym! Just experiment with adding some to increase your results.


So, if we look at our examples, we can do this:

Example

Exercise OR workout OR PE OR "physical education" OR sports

Example

"body image" OR "self perception" OR "self regard" OR "self worth" OR "sense of worth"

Example

teen* OR adolescent OR "young adult"


Okay, but now that is three different searches ... how do we combine them? The answer is nesting.

Nesting

Do you remember formulas from math class? Parenthesis ( ) were used to isolate different parts of the formula. We will do the same thing to make our advanced search.

Each concept will be put into its own set of parentheses with all of its synonyms. Therefore, if we combine our new synonyms with the basic search exercise AND "body image" AND teen*, then we can create this new search:

Example

( Exercise OR workout OR PE OR "physical education" OR sports ) AND ( "body image" OR "self perception" OR "self regard" OR "self worth" OR "sense of worth" ) AND ( teen* OR adolescent OR "young adult" )


See It In Action

Please watch this short video (01:49 min) to see it in action. A transcript of the video is also provided for you.

"Advanced Keyword Searching in LIRNSearch" Video Transcript


Remember

After you make changes to your search, be sure to click "Go" to apply the changes and refresh your results.