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Unit 4: Search Methods
Lesson 1: Keyword Searching
When looking for information on a newly defined research topic, it’s best to start with keyword searching. Keywords are significant terms that identify the information described in an online search tool. Keyword searching prompts online search tools to find works that include your keyword search term in all fields of each bibliographic record.
That’s a lot of library jargon! Below are some definitions:
Online search tools are library catalogs, subscription databases, and search engines. A search engine is an Internet site, such as Google.com, which allows you to search other websites. A bibliographic record is the description of an individual resource in a collection of library materials. Bibliographic records are organized into fields, including author, title, publication place and date, page number, summary, and subject fields.
Search by keyword to
- look for ideas for your research
- find information about a particular topic
- combine two or more concepts
- find exact subject headings for your topic
- find complete title or author information
- search the entire bibliographic record
Remember: The keywords you choose for searching will affect the number of relevant results you retrieve from online search tools. Your search is only as successful as the quality of the keywords you use, and how you combine them. If you use very common search terms, you will retrieve a lot of irrelevant material. If your search terms are too specific, you will retrieve few results.
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