English 110

Search Keywords Tutorial by Ray W. Howard Library at Shoreline Community College

Key terms are the search terms you use to find materials in databases, search engines, OneSearch or elsewhere.

Key terms work by matching the words you entered with words that appear either:

• in the text of the articles you find
• in the materials used to describe the materials you're searching.

For example, here's the description of an article we might want to find in our search on vampires and sexuality:

To find this article, you need to use terms matching some of the terms that show up here.  As you can see, sexuality was a good search term because it was included in the abstract for this article. 

Even better, it shows up in the subject terms. These are terms that are consistent throughout the database and describe what the article is about. If your keyword is listed as a subject term, you can be very confident that it's important to the article.

Subject terms are designated search terms that are consistent throughout the database.

This can be important when you are searching for a concept that might be expressed in different ways. For instance, one of the articles in our our search is about adolescents. However, another common term for this concept is teenagers.  If you wanted more article on this topic, which term should you search?

You have two options:

• You can find out what the designated subject term is for the concept.  If you look at the list of subject terms in the articles you turn up, you might be able to find it.
• You can search using both terms, like this: teenagers OR adolescents.  In this case, the word OR means that your search will find all the articles that include either term. 

In that case, my search might look like this: 

Now, every article I find will definitely reference vampires, and it will also refer to either adolescents or teenagers.

Remember: If you aren't sure what search terms to use, think about what terms other people might use to describe your topic!

Some things to consider:

• Specificity
  • "Vampire" is a better search term than "monster" because it is more specific; you will often get more useful results with a more specific search.
• Concreteness
  • Intangible concepts can OFTEN be good search terms, but only if they are frequently used in a specific context:
  • "Colonialism" is a good search term. "Cruelty" is not.
• Ideological bias
  • "Law enforcement" and "police brutality" will return a very different list of results. 

Revising Your Search

When you search, take a look at your search results! You can pull words from your results to search again.  It might take a few searches to find the search results you want. Don't give up too quickly! 

Practice

You can practice generating search terms in the Library Workbook for English 110.