How to Use Keywords to Find Research Material

Wednesday, October 17, 2007
 

Instructions

  • Step 1:
    Understand that a keyword is a specific term or phrase that is unique to the subject on which you are trying to find research material.
  • Step 2:
    Try to narrow your search keywords to as specific, unique and thorough a combination as possible. For example, if you are trying to find information on human parvovirus--a condition that also affects dogs--you would type, "human parvovirus" into your web browser. If you just type in "parvovirus" you will get a list of search results that include mainly information on canine parvovirus. Including the keyword "human" eliminates those results.
  • Step 3:
    Cast a wide net. If you are researching material on a subject that you know little about, do a general search for terms that you think might be related. Check a couple of the search results to see if there are particular keywords that tend to occur. If so, then perform a new search on that keyword.
  • Step 4:
    Eliminate litter. You do not need to type complete, grammatically correct sentences or use punctuation when conducting Internet searches for research material. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! ignore words that are considered non-essential such as "a" and "the."
  • Step 5:
    Learn how to use operators. Operators are "little" words that can completely alter your keyword search results. While search engines do ignore words such as "a" and "the," words such as "and" and "or" actually act as instructions to the search engine. For example, let's say you're looking for biographical information on Evelyn Explorer for a research paper you are writing. If you type "Evelyn Explorer" into your browser, you'll get a list of results that include websites some of which will have both words and more of which will have one or the other word. If you type "Evelyn and Explorer" into your browser, you will receive a list of results that only includes both words in that order, thereby eliminating a lot of useless information from the search results. Other phrases such as "how to," "what is" and "define:" also work to narrow the search results.

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