When considering which keywords to use, you can start from your research question/information need and divide it into different themes or parts. What are the key concepts in the research question?
Example. Research question: What effect does mindfulness have on students' well-being?
| Students | Mindfulness | Well-being |
The next step is to write down as many keywords as you can think of for each part of your research question. Use textbooks, encyclopedias, and articles to find relevant keywords, for example. Keep in mind that most scientific articles are written in English. Therefore, it is important to find the correct English terms.
Try to find:
In this video, you can learn more about how to work with your keywords.
To get an overview of your keywords, write them down in a document that you then use to combine keywords within the same theme and then combine these different themes together. On the page Combine your keywords, you can see how to perform combination searches using the words AND or OR.
Use the following empty form to organize your keywords: Empty form
If you are not getting good results with your original keywords, you can try different search techniques to get more relevant or fewer irrelevant results.
Truncation involves replacing the end of the word with an asterisk. This way, you search for all words that start in a certain way regardless of how they end.
Example: If you write mother* you will get results for mother, mothers, motherhood, motherless etc.
You can learn more about truncation on the page Too few results?
Phrase searching can be used if you want to search for a name or a specific term consisting of two or more words. You do this by writing the words within quotation marks " ".
Example: If you write "social media" within quotation marks, you will only get results where the words social and media appear next to each other in the order you specified.
You can learn more about phrase searching on the page Too many irrelevant results?
Some subject databases use controlled subject terms collected in a list called a thesaurus. A thesaurus will help you find proper keywords by providing synonyms and related terms, making your searches more accurate and comprehensive.
Learn more about subject terms on the page How can you use controlled subject terms?