Search Strategies

Keywords are the words you decide to use in your search, or the words related to your topic or appearing in your search results.

EXAMPLE: Your research topic is the impact of the media on perceptions about immigration. The keywords are "media," "perceptions," and "immigration."

A keyword searches all of the fields in the library catalog and database records, including title, abstract or summary, and subjects or descriptors. The search looks for each of the keywords wherever they appear, either by themselves or in different orders. This can result in too many or too few results, and it may retrieve irrelevant results.

Subject searching is a specialized type of search. Subject terms, also called descriptors, come from a pre-determined or controlled vocabulary. It searches only the subject or descriptor fields in a library catalog or database. This identifies what the item is about.

When you find an article that fits your research topic, look at the subject terms that are assigned to the record. This will provide additional keywords and concepts to find materials relevant to your search.

Using the previous example, the following Subject Terms are applied to several articles retrieved from Academic Search Premier:

• Emigration & immigration law
• Mass media
• Ethnicity
• Press
• Accuracy in journalism
• Television broadcasting of news -- objectivity
• Public opinion
• Communication

​These terms can be added to your search to expand the results, or to find additional relevant resources.

1. Formulate your search strategy by breaking your topic into concepts.

Your topic is the impact of the media on perceptions about immigration:

2. List all relevant keywords

3. Organize how your search will be entered, using search operators: AND, OR, NOT. Remember, the more terms included in your search, the narrower the results become.