For Health Professionals

Keywords are words and phrases used in searching. Careful selection of keywords allows you to construct an effective search statement in order to find articles and books directly relating to your topic.

To select your keywords, frame your topic into a statement or question and select the most important concepts. These are the terms you will use in your search.

Ex: Do prescription drugs for depression cause addiction?

Unlike the web, searching online databases - e.g., searchable electronic collections of journal articles or online catalogs - requires us to be careful about our search terms.

Searching is a process. Don’t be discouraged if you aren’t successful at first; try new keyword combinations. Here are a few suggestions for effective searching.

• Keep it simple. Limit searches to two or three keywords or phrases.
• Use synonyms. We can’t always know exactly how the author has chosen to express their concept, so consider alternate keywords with the same or similar meanings.
  • Ex: Use HIV when searching for AIDS
  • Use higher education when searching for colleges or universities
• Focus your search. If you are searching for an article in an online database, and your search produces too many results, you can easily reduce and focus your results list by:
  • adding or changing keywords to make your topic more specific,
  • adding limiters such as Date Range (Published Date From) or Scholarly/Peer-reviewed  journals

Combine keywords with Boolean Operators to make your search more powerful.

AND – includes all terms.  Narrows search results.

Ex. drugs AND athletes. Results will include both terms, not just drugs or athletes alone.

OR – includes any term. Broadens search results.

Ex. colleges OR universities.  Useful when searching synonymous terms – saves having to do separate searches.

NOT – excludes terms.  Narrows search results.

Ex. cirrhosis NOT alcohol. Will produce results about cirrhosis, but not alcohol-related cirrhosis.

Phrase Searching – Use quotation marks to search your terms all together as a phrase.

Ex. “prescription drug use” or “Regina Benjamin” or “sleep disorders”

Truncation – searches for a root word with varying endings. Use the * or ? symbols, depending on the database.

Ex.  diet* will result in: diet, diets, dieting, dietary, dietician, dieticians, etc.