What is Keyword Searching? 

If you are doing research for a discussion post, a paper, presentation or a speech, Library Search is the place to start. Library Search will look for the exact words and phrases you type in, so keyword searching is the best strategy for find sources that are related to your topic. 

To do a keyword search, type in the main concepts that best describe your topic. Avoid typing in complete sentences or questions, these may get you no or irrelevant search results.  

How to do keyword searching:

• Step 1: Identify Main Concepts of your topic/what you are looking for.  These concepts will form the building blocks of your search strategy.
  • Example Topic: How does telehealth effect access to healthcare for rural patients? 
  • Example Topic's Key Concepts: "Telehealth" and "access to healthcare" and "rural patients". 
  • Explanation of key concepts: The rest of the words in the sentence: "how", "does", "effect" and "for" are not specific to what the topic is about. The entire phrase "Access to healthcare" means the ability of people to get medical services, in this case the entire phrase is important to the topic. 
• Step 2: Brainstorm and write down keywords for each of your topic concepts. You should include:
  • Related/similar terms
  • Spelling variation
  • Spell out acronyms
  • Narrower terms
  • Broader terms 

Example Brainstorming: Using the above example topic, here is a list of brainstormed terms for each of the key concepts: 

• Step 3: Combine your keywords from each of your key concepts and enter them into Library Search using what are called 'Boolean Operators': AND, OR, NOT. These provides library search instructions for what you are looking for. 

Boolean Operator and what they do:

• Example Search: Entering in the keyword search: Telehealth OR Telemedicine AND "access to healthcare" AND rural patients tells the database to retrieve items that include the words telehealth OR telemedicine AND also includes "access to healthcare" and rural patients. The quotation marks around "access to healthcare" tell Library Search to find those words in that order. See how this search results highlights all the keywords:

Tips:

• You may need to try several searches to find relevant sources. Try multiple combinations of keywords, track your searches in the attached worksheet
• Good research topics usually has 2-4 concepts. Topics with one concept will usually retrieve way too many results, topics with too many concepts may limit your results too much.
• To brainstorm keywords, try doing background research online and write down terms you see repeated and used to describe your topic
• Long questions or sentences will result in no or irrelevant results