Hello! I am Heather Butler, the librarian for your discipline. I am here to help you with your research projects in this course and throughout your career here at South!
You have a major research paper due in this course. This LibGuide is designed to support you as you research. If you have any questions, please email me at hmbutler@southalabama.edu. Include your course number and professor's name in the subject line.
How do you know what search terms to use when you create a search?
Searching is an iterative process. You will likely have to make multiple searches while trying out different search terms and different combinations of the search terms. You don't know what is out there until you make a search.
Our example research question for this project is:
Was mass participation or charismatic leadership most important in directing the Mexican Revolution?
To create search terms, we need to identify the key terms in our research question. For this question, we can pick out:
It is important to keep phrases in quotes. This helps the search function understand that you are looking for "mass participation", and you are not looking for books about just "mass", the physics concept.
Each of these terms we can search for. We can combine the terms into the same searches. Combining search terms means that you can search multiple terms at once. All of your search results should relate to both terms. This is especially important for terms like "mass participation," which is also used in sports psychology and physics!
We can also use synonyms or equivalent terms for each keyword.
Example: "Mass participation" can also be: "collective action" or even "crowd psychology"
We can also search related ideas, such as looking for a monograph about one of the charismatic leaders in the Mexican Revolution.
You can turn your research question into search terms. This is a good way to make sure that you are looking for resources that relate to your paper's scope and topic.
Identify the important words or terms in your research question. These are more likely to be the nouns that you use to specify the scope of your topic.
Write out each important word/term as it appears in your research question. Next to the term, list synonyms. You can also search words that mean the same thing.
You can use our digital search term worksheet to turn your research question into search terms.
When you find an article you like, look at that article's keywords. These are the words the database attaches to the article. They are usually written underneath the article's listing in your search results.
Different databases use different keywords. By reusing the keywords that the database likes, you are learning to speak that database's "language".
Some databases will give you suggestions for search terms when you start typing in a search term textbox. You can select those suggestions if you want. Of course, you can always type out your own text to search, but these suggestions are terms that the database absolutely recognizes.
Often, the suggestions will be several terms in the same box, all separated by or. This means that the search engine will search for all those terms at once.
Always check before you select a string of terms. Some of the terms might not be equivalent for your research topic!
