What is Keyword Searching? 

If you are doing research for a discussion post, a paper, presentation or a speech, using Library A to Z Databases are the place to start. Databases 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. For example if you are researching the effects of caffeine use on anxiety, you would search "Caffeine and anxiety".

The below process gives a complete overview and tips for how to do comprehensive research to target information using keyword searching. 

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 variations
    • 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 and concepts with the capitalized words 'AND', 'OR', 'NOT' (these are called Boolean Operators) and enter them into a Library Database . 

Boolean Operators and what they do:

• Example Search based on the topic and keywords: Telehealth OR Telemedicine AND "access to healthcare" AND rural patients. This search tells the library database to retrieve items that include the words either telehealth OR telemedicine AND also includes access to healthcare and rural patients.  See how this search results highlights all the keywords:

It may take a few tries to find the search results you are looking for, use different combinations of your brainstormed keywords to target different topics and the information you need.