Library Skills Tutorials

Tutorial 3: Keyword Searching Techniques

Preparing a Search

Watch this page in a video slideshow.

Before you begin a keyword search, think about your topic.  Decide on some words (terms) to express the most important concepts. 

Only significant words that express the subject matter should be used as keywords, not trivial words such as "of", "compare", "effect", "reaction", etc. These words add no value to your search, and will cause you to lose useful records. Remember that keyword searching only finds items that contain these words, so be sure each word is important.

Next, think of other terms which might express the same concepts.  These will be our keywords. Keep in mind that the system searches for the exact letters you type, and not the general ideas they express. The system doesn't think. So you have to plan for single and plural, more specific and more general terms, nouns, adjectives, and verbs, etc.

Example

For example, let's take the topic
"Are pregnancy rates rising among teenage girls in Canada?".

The main concepts are "pregnancy", "teenage", "Canada".

"Rates" is too limiting, and "girls" is redundant when referring to pregnant teenagers.
You will be interested in any information dealing with teenagers, pregnancy, and Canada.

Now we need to think of other ways of expressing our terms:

If you do this work before you begin your search, you'll be ready to create many different searches using the list you prepare. This will make it easier when one of your searches doesn't get the results you want; just move on to the next search.

Write down anything that comes to mind; you may not actually use all these terms, but they're there if you need them. Don't try to think of every possibility, either; just try to get the important ones. You'll get more ideas as you view your results.

The next screen covers combining search terms with boolean operators.

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