Many students find using databases frustrating because they don’t realize you must “talk” to them differently than Google. They speak two different languages. That means if you type a full sentence or question in a database, you’ll get strange results!
You need to translate what you want to find into a form the database understands. Rather than long sentences, databases use keywords: significant words or phrases related to your research. Keywords are the main words you want your results to contain.
How do we find keywords? There are three main ways, depending on where you are in the process of developing your topic.
Let’s say your history teacher has assigned a research paper on World War II.
It’s good to start with brainstorming, using your current knowledge to generate keywords. From previous history classes, you may know some keywords such as Axis Powers, Adolf Hitler, Pearl Harbor.
What if you’re starting with broad, unfamiliar topic? Background reading can help you focus your topic and identify some additional keywords. (We talk about this more in Developing a Topic.)
This brainstorming and background reading helps you focus your broader topic. Maybe you saw something about rationing during the war and decide to do your paper on that. To find the keywords from that focused area, you can underline the most important words.
how the United States used rationing/ration books during World War II
Keywords are the main ideas that can stand alone. In this example, United States, rationing/ration books, and World War II are all the most important ideas that we’d want our sources to contain. Words like “how,” “used,” and “during” are supporting terms and should be ignored when building a keyword search.
Once we have some keywords selected, we can use them to search the library databases. Keyword searching means the database looks for the keywords you enter in any field – so you may find them in the title, abstract, or Subject fields of your results.
That means you’ll also need to evaluate the results for relevance. Results that mention your keyword once in the abstract probably aren’t as relevant as ones with the keywords in the abstract and title or subject fields.
Each of the additional tools, Boolean Operators, Nesting, Phrase Searching, Truncation, tells the database something about how you want to combine your keywords. Since we cannot use a full sentence or question like in Google, these help provide context. All of them have different uses and should be chosen to meet your specific needs.
The chart below shows a search with all four tools, continuing off the earlier example.
Keep in mind that you may need to adjust your selected keywords or the tools used to connect them based on your results – sometimes even multiple times – before you find the best fit. Perseverance and adaptability are integral parts of successful research.
