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Selecting Keywords

Let's assume you have an initial idea for a topic. You can use a word representing that topic as your initial keyword. When you perform a search using that keyword you may find the result gives you too many article citations or too few. Follow the suggestions below for either of these two cases.

Too Much Information

In the example of special education as a topic, you can see that the use of the term education by itself, especially if you are in an education database, would give you a multitude of sources. Even narrowing the topic to special education would produce too many articles and you would have difficulty picking out a meaningful combination of articles.

What to do? State your topic as a question or write a sentence describing the issue. Identify significant words in your sentence. Leave out common words (such as education, business, especially if you are in a business database.) Leave out all articles (a, an, the), prepositions (in, of, on, for, over, etc.) and conjunctions (and, or, not, but, etc.). Pick one or more additional words which identify concepts that describe some aspect of your topic. In our example the question might be "What effect has special education had on the academic achievement of elementary school students who are in a special education program?" Here the word effect is too nebulous and you would not want to use it as a keyword. In fact, you might want to restate your question as follows: "Has there been any improvement in the academic achievement of elementary school students as a result of their being in a special education program?"

Too Little Information

If your search result was zero or too few articles you may need to broaden your topic.

What to do? You can broaden your topic by choosing a broader keyword, an alternate keyword or by giving the system a choice of related keywords.

  • Examples of broader keywords are owl instead of spotted owl, sports instead of soccer, and clergy instead of minister.
  • Examples of alternate keywords are students or adolescents instead of teenagers, marijuana instead of pot, HIV instead of aids, literacy instead of illiteracy, and wages instead of earnings

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There are two ways to give the system a choice of related keywords.
  • One is by using the OR function enclosed in parentheses such as (alcohol or drinking).
  • Another is by using a truncation symbol. This symbol will vary depending on the system you are in, but it is usually a #, $, or &. For example, medic# will represent medicine, medical and medicinal, etc. in a database which uses # as a truncation symbol.
If the database you are using is ERIC, PSYCHINFO, or if you are in the EIU Online Catalog, you may want to consult the specialized thesaurus for the database or online catalog.

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