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Quinebaug Valley Campus Library

Quinebaug Valley at Willimantic Center

What are Keywords?

Keywords or key phrases are words that describe the core concept of your research. They can be used to help you identify relevant resources in library catalogs or databases. Identifying strong keywords is important for quickly and effectively finding sources that you can use to support your research. 

You can think of them like a key! Choosing the right keys will open the right doors without you needing to look through every open room. 

Why use Keywords?

Public search engines are designed to try and predict what resources you want. If you type in "bird in Connecticut" search engines may also give you results on "wildlife in Connecticut" or "birds in New England." Sometimes this is helpful, but other times it make it difficult to find the information you're actually looking for among the thousands of results. For example, you search results for "bird in Connecticut" may also point you to a café in Connecticut called the "Early Bird." This is because the search engine is looking for appearances of the word anywhere on the page. 

Libraries and research databases use keywords to help organize the thousands of resources we make available to our users. When a new book or article comes in, librarians assign various keywords to it based on its subject and content. This means that when you search in a library database the system won't automatically generate synonyms or try to make predictions about what you want. Creating strong keywords takes practice, but it also gives you more control over what resources you find. 

Keyword Searching

Using Keywords

Using our library database when searching for articles does not work like using a typical search engine.  A library database will look for all the words you put into the search box, exactly how you have typed them.  A typical search engine though will ignore some of the words you have typed into the search box, or look for words that are close to your word or term when performing your search.

So if you typed into a library database:

Why are children more overweight?

 

The library database will literally look for ALL the following words: 

 

Why
Are
Children
More
Overweight

 

Words like WHY, ARE, and MORE are unneeded in your search and could complicate the results.

 

Instead, we should identify the main concepts of our search.  These can be the parts of our search that are most important, or that do not describe another part of our thesis statement. These concepts are called keywords and these are the words that we use to search with.

 

Children
Overweight
Causes

 

Using Synonyms

A synonym is a word that is similar to your keywords.  Not everyone uses the same words to describe the same concept and we want to make sure that we do not miss important sources.

For example, we can use other words for Overweight:

 

Obesity
Fat
Large

 

Putting it all together

By adding an OR to each keyword or using the drop down box to the left, the database will search for sources that contain either term. This allows us to use multiple synonyms in the same search.

 

By adding an AND to each keyword or using the drop down box to the left, the database will search for sources where both items appear. The allows us to narrow our search down using multiple main terms together.

Still having trouble coming up with some keywords to use?  Try using this worksheet from UConn to point you in the right direction.