Searching: Keywords and phrasing
Search engines in Library Search and the academic databases match search terms within their indexes.
Use these techniques to search academic sources effectively:
- Breakdown a topic into keywords
- Know when to search for phrases
- Mind the stop words.
Keywords
Because most academic search tools do not interpret natural language, you must break your topic into to keywords you will use as search terms.
Keywords are the most important words in the question or sentence you want to search for.
When you think about researching a topic, pick out key themes from your assignment title, essay plan, or literature review outline.
See keywords examples in the table below:
| Sentence | Corresponding Keywords |
|---|---|
| At what time will the bus pass? | Bus timetable |
| When is the library open? | Opening hours |
| Find popular pictures with cats. | Cat memes |
You need more keywords to expand your research, but how can you know what you don't know yet? Try these tried and tested methods:
Find synonyms and alternative keywords
The language used in the subject is probably not the only way to describe it. Each writer or researcher may use a different terminology.
You can find synonyms in online thesauri such as:
or in computer apps such as:
-
The Oxford English thesaurus in macOS’s Dictionary app
-
Microsoft Office apps: Word, Outlook, OneNote, etc...
Ask questions (the right ones)
A good way to explore a topic is to ask yourself questions related to the subject to uncover new angles about the topic. See the research frameworks page for examples.
The words relating to the themes in your assignment should form the basis of your keyword search. The Centre for Academic Success has a useful study guide about understanding questions in assignments.
Plan your search
A more comprehensive approach is to perform a scoping search. You can learn more about scoping in the Enhancing your Researching Skills e-learning course.
Phrase searching
Phrase searching is a way of making your search more specific via proximity.
BCU Library Search examples
- The search string tulips spring brings almost the same results as tulips AND spring.
- "tulips spring", brings only results where the two keywords appear in this specific order and are separated by a space or symbol.
They may interpret spaces as an operator AND unless you wrap search terms between quotation marks "" to force a phrase.
Most databases contain a guide to explain how their Boolean connectors are used and how phrase searching is performed.
See this guide's section about AND, OR and NOT for more information about Boolean operators.
Stop words
These are the most common words which you'll find in each language.
When you search for a stop word, most databases will ignore them during a basic keyword search.
Here are some the words ignored by Library Search:
A, Are, Few, He, I, In, Itself, Me, No, Of, She, The, What, ...
Stop words example
If you search for how to expand your vocabulary, Library Search ignores the words "how", "to" and "your", meaning it will find any publications mentioning both "expand" AND "vocabulary".
If you search for "how to expand your vocabulary" with quotations marks, it will find that exact phrase, including "how", "to" and "your" in that order.
Each database may handle stop words differently. Check the database help section to be sure.