Developing a list of search terms saves time. Thinking about your search terms ahead of time makes the research process more efficient and allows you to gather increasingly large amounts of source material.
Multiple search terms allow you to explore your topic more thoroughly. Most topics are multidimensional and include other aspects. Considering these different aspects will help ensure you are fully exploring your topic.
As previously mentioned, different sources will use different terms to discuss the same ideas. Thinking about and using those search terms will help you locate a variety of relevant sources.
After developing your research question, your next step is identifying the keyword search terms you will use to find information that will answer your research question.
Select the words or phrases from your research question that are essential to describing your topic. These are usually nouns and verbs in your question:
What can schools do to address social media bullying among teenagers ?
Then, develop a list of alternative keywords for each of the keywords you identified. Think about synonyms, specific examples, and related terms or phrases. This will help you find sources that cover your topic, but use different terms to describe books and articles about that topic.
| Schools | Social Media/Bullying | Teenagers |
| High School | cyberbullying | teens |
| middle school | online bullying | young adults |
| education | online harassment | students |
| teachers | internet bullying | adolescents |
| counselors | internet harassment | high school students |
| administrators | cyberstalking | middle school students |
Brainstorming alternative keywords allows us to create more complex, effective searches. Remember: keywords are the language of search engines and databases. Different articles or books are going to use different words to address the same topic.
Take our research question above, for example. Not all of Shafer Library's sources on schools addressing social media bullying among teenagers can be discovered by simply using the terms schools, social media bullying, and teenagers. Some sources will be may be using the terms teachers, cyberbullying, and adolescents...but that does not mean they fall outside the scope of our topic. Those sources are simply using different keywords from the keywords identified in our research question. By including alternative keywords in our searches, we cast a wider net over the database and gather increasingly large amounts of source material relevant to our research interests. We do this by strategically combining search terms.
Boolean operators set the parameters of your search by combining keywords and defining the relationship(s) between search terms. They are used to strategically connect similar sources in a database. We do this by broadening or narrowing our search using the operators AND, OR, or NOT. See EBSCO's Searching with Boolean Operators or MIT's Boolean Operators guide for more information.
AND connects your search terms so all keywords are included in the search results.
From the database search screen, we would enter our query like this:
"black lives matter" AND "police brutality"
OR connects your search terms to retrieve sources that contain either of your search terms. We most often use OR to search synonyms or related phrases simultaneously.
From the database search screen, we could build on our query further:
("police brutality" OR "police violence") AND "black lives matter"
NOT will eliminate keywords or key phrases you do not want included in your search results. Researchers will typically use the NOT operator if their search results are overflowing with irrelevant sources.
For example, if our search "black lives matter" AND "police brutality" was overwhelmed by sources related to the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century, we could narrow our search query using the NOT operator:
"black lives matter" AND "police brutality" NOT "civil rights movement"