Searches in Google will work if you type in the entire question "?" but if we were to type in the whole question into the library search - it would not be very effective. Keywords are the individual words and phrases from your topic sentence or research question that we will use in the library search to find academic articles. The more keywords you add to the search, the more focused/narrow your search will be. We encourage you to start out with one or two keywords to see what literature exists on your topic, then add in more keywords to narrow your search.
Keywords are the individual words and/or phrases from your topic sentence or research question that we will use in the library search to find academic articles.
Research is a science because we can follow a series of steps to achieve a result, but it is also an art because we all use different vocabulary. Part of learning a discipline at university is learning what terms researchers in that area use to describe their work. Technology is pretty good at finding related terms when we use keywords in a search, but sometimes we can try a search and not much comes up. If this happens, reflect on the keywords you have chosen - are there synonyms that describe the same concept? For example, some of us may use the term 'youth' or 'teens', but in much of the literature this age group is referred to as 'adolescents'. Doing some background reading (perhaps via Google or in a book) may also give you some of the preferred terminology for a discipline.
Youth -> Teens -> Teenagers -> Adolescents
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Before moving ahead with the research process, take some time to highlight or note the keywords for your topic. List out any synonyms you can think of before searching. |