When conducting research, the words you choose are as important as the places where you search - this guide will help you choose effective terms.
Walk through this tutorial to learn more about Choosing & Using Keywords.
How To Choose Effective Keywords
When searching in the library databases, it's not effective to enter the entire research topic or question like you would in Google. Instead, you want to break down your topic or question into keywords.
Ask yourself what are the main points or ideas of your topic?
Let's say you were researching methods for encouraging student engagement among rural high school students; your keywords would be rural communities, student engagement, and high school.
It is also useful to brainstorm alternate keywords for your topic. These can be synonyms, sub-topics you are interested in, related terms, etc.
There are also words that aren't useful as keywords, such as "effect" or "benefit." Instead, try to brainstorm the specific effects or benefits to use as keywords.
Also, if you find an article you like, look at its Abstract, Subjects or Indexing Terms to find new keywords to search with.
This content is adapted from Utah State Univesity Libraries "Research Tips", licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0