Research Skills  Tags: research catalog articles references databases www evaluating connectivity books skills assignments  

Once you've worked out the main concepts of your topic, you need to look for alternative terms or keywords that describe each concept to use as search terms.
This guide gives you some hints on how to find keywords.

Define and understand your concepts
Why do we need keywords?
Where do we look for keywords?
How to combine keywords

Link to online dictionaries and thesauri

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Define and understand your concepts

Once you've worked out your concepts it is always helpful to get a clear definition of the terms.

You can use a variety of dictionaries and encyclopaedias for this. Libraries always have general English dictionaries where you can find a short definition, and often have special subject dictionaries and encyclopaedias, in business, medicine or computing etc, to give you more in-depth definitions and background information. (Note: Most libraries keep dictionaries and encyclopaedias in their Reference Collections and you usually cannot borrow them).

For example, here is a short definition of the term "mental health" from the Online Oxford English Dictionary:

"mental health, health of the mind as distinct from physical health; the condition of a person or group in respect of the functioning of the mind; the branch of medicine that deals with this... "

In The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition the entry for "mental health" is:

1. A state of emotional and psychological well-being in which an individual is able to use his or her cognitive and emotional capabilities, function in society, and meet the ordinary demands of everyday life.
2. A branch of medicine that deals with the achievement and maintenance of psychological well-being.
3. A person's overall emotional and psychological condition: Since witnessing the accident, his mental health has been poor.

These definitions also help us identify some alternative keywords to broaden or limit the search.

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Why do we need keywords?

You may be wondering why we need to find alternative terms for our concepts.

When you search library catalogs, journal databases and the World Wide Web, a computer searches for references with the term you type in. Unfortunately, computers will ONLY search for that term and you may miss lots of useful information in other references. So to search effectively, you may need to search on several alternative terms or keywords.

You also need to remember that that the terms can vary from country to country. "Physical therapy" is used in American instead of "Physiotherapy" which is used in Austrialia.

Spelling can also vary from country to country. For example: "colour" and "color", "programme" and "program", "behaviour" and "behavior", "organisation" and "organization".

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Where do we look for keywords?

As we have already seen, you can find alternative keywords in general and subject dictionaries. Based on the definitions for the term "mental health" above, alternative keywords and keywords to narrow your search could be:

Mental illness
Psychology
Psychiatry
Emotional
Psychological
etc.

Another useful resource to check is a thesaurus, a publication that gives synonyms. You can look at a general thesaurus like the   Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, or check a specialised thesaurus. The specialised thesauri are very useful when you are searching a database for journal articles. 

Here is the Roget's Thesaurus entry for "mental health" and just "mental":

mental illness
mental state
frame of mind
psychological
mental disorder
mental processes

You can see that we have some more terms that we could use as alternative keywords. HOWEVER, you don't need to use them all!

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How to combine keywords

So far we have discussed finding keywords for a particular concept, but generally we want to find resources that contain more than one term or concept. To do this we need to combine terms using a specific style of phrasing known as Boolean (Boo-lee-an) operators.

If we want to look for several different terms in the same reference we use the operator "AND" (for 'as well as'). For example if our topic was "energy conservation at home and at work", the phrase would be:

energy conservation AND home AND work

We are asking the computer to search for references with all of these terms.

If we have some alternative terms for each keyword we use the operator OR (for either...or ).
For example:

energy conservation OR energy efficiency OR energy saving

Here we are asking the computer to search for any of these terms.