Everyone uses information all the time in their daily lives, and doing research in college is only a little bit different. Hopefully, these workshops will teach you some skills to better seek out information in both "real life" and your college career.
In class this week, we talked a little bit about keywords. When you type a search into Google, (like "taco bell hours," "duke unc," or "cardi b") you're doing something called a keyword search. Searching library resources, like our catalog of books or scholarly article databases, is very similar! There are some differences you should know about, however.
Unfortunately, since using Google is free, it doesn't have all the academic sources you're going to need as a college student. I'll talk a little bit more next week about why you even need to search places other than Google, but this week we're focusing on creating good search terms/keywords.
Here are some of my tips for creating good search terms:
- Look at the keyword-making handout I gave out in class! It's also linked on this page. It gives some examples of creating search terms from a specific topic.
- BRAINSTORM! This has been the most helpful for me: think about different words people use to refer to your topic. Try them all out and see what you get! For example, when searching for information on women, you could try words like women, woman, girls, female, women of color, feminism, women's liberation.
- Connect words with AND, OR, NOT.
- AND makes sure both words show up in your search results, like "women AND girls" or "racism AND Trump." Most (but not all) search engines, like Google, do this automatically when you type something like "women girls" or "racism Trump" but you can add AND in to be safe!
- OR expands your search results by making sure either word shows up in your search results. If you search "women OR girls," you'll get results with the word "women" in them, results with the word "girls" in them, and results with both!
- NOT is great for narrowing your results; it makes sure the word after NOT doesn't appear in the results at all. If you search "nazism NOT Germany" you'll get results about nazism without the word "Germany" in any of the results.
- When starting to search, take note of the language used in some of the results you're finding. Use words you're finding to help you search even further!
