Skip to Main Content Albertsons Library Reservations

Project Writing and Research E-Textbook: Keywords

Project Writing and Research - where the Library and First Year Writing courses team up for student success! This textbook has been collaboratively developed to introduce the basic skills that students need for beginning research.

Keywords: Introduction & Goals

Introduction

Whether you're using Google, Wikipedia, the library catalog, or a specialized article database, keywords are really important. Keywords are how you tell the computer what you want, so that it can give you good results. The steps to writing keywords include: 

  • Identify your topic
  • Identify the concepts in your topic
  • Generate keywords for each concept
  • Generate broader and narrower keywords for each concept

Goals

By the end of this module, you should be able to generate a list of keywords to help you find material for your topic.

Step 1: View this video on generating keywords

Step 2: View part 2 of generating keywords

Step 3: Narrowing your search

Narrowing a search

Sometimes your keywords are too broad, and you find too much material. For example, if I search for the keyword "basketball" in the library catalog, I get 17,787 books. That's too much! I need to be more specific.

There are two ways to narrow a search. One is to generate more specific keywords. For instance, "NBA" is more specific than "basketball."

Another way to narrow is to add a second concept. We do this using the word AND (because many databases will otherwise presume that you want to search as a phrase, such as "National Basketball Association," which is really a single concept). I can think of lots of ways to do this with basketball, for instance: 

  • basketball and women
  • basketball and college
  • basketball and injury
The possibilities are endless!
 
 

Step 4: Broadening your search

Broadening your search

Other times your keywords are too narrow, and you can't find anything. For instance, if I type "Boise and high school and basketball" into the Library catalog, I only get one item. I need to broaden my search. 

There are two ways to make your search more broad. The first is to remove concepts. For instance, I could try "high school and basketball" or "Boise and basketball."

Another way to broaden a search is to generate broader keywords. "Sports" is broader than "basketball," for instance, and "Idaho" is broader than "Boise."

Direct link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsm6AkAuvTw

Got a question?