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ENGL 368: African-American Literature (Knight)

Fall 2018

Keyword Searching: How it Works

When you're using databases, you want to use keywords to search for materials related to your topic. Lets say your project is about African American Men and the criminal justice system in Native Son. Lets make a quick list of keywords relating to this topic:

Native Son, Richard Wright, Black Men, African American Men, Crime, Criminality, Police, Justice System.

You can search for these terms individually or try combining them for more refined results. Try using search terms like AND, OR or NOT.

"Black men" OR "African American men" and "crime."

Use NOT when you want to exclude a word or phrase.

Here are some general tips to guide you in choosing your search terms:

  • Use concepts and other nouns as your keywords.  Think of words that are likely to be used in titles (or that you have seen in titles).
  • Spend some time brainstorming keywords and search terms. Use the subject headings/tags in each database to help you think of search terms. For example, if you search for "Native Son" and identity, you might come across additional terms like alienation, blackness, and self. 
  • Use an asterisk * after the root of a word to find all forms of a word. For example, a search for race* will find sources that use not only the word race, but also terms like racial and racism. 

Bonus Tip:

When you find a good article, look at its References or Works Cited list. That will often lead you to other useful sources. You can also look at information such as the name of the journal or the author for ideas of other ways to search.

Research Database vs. Google

Infographic titled in purple text Web Search Engine versus Database. subtitle in black text Searching the content versus Searching the metadata. In a box on the left are the words When you type in keywords to an internet search engine (like Google), it searches for your keywords in ALL (in red text) of the web page’s content!. Underneath these words is an image of a person with their hands on either side of their head, surrounded by books and loose papers. There are lines coming off his head to signify confusion. In the box on the right there is text that says When you search a Database it searches for your (begin text in red) keywords in short "profiles" (metadata) (end text in red) of the book, article, or other source that you are looking at, rather than the whole source. Below this text is an image of a target with two hands above and below focusing, like you would see through a camera scope and an image of documents. There are doodles of arrows, magnifying glasses, and question marks scattered on the page for decoration. Below the two boxes is a long narrow books with black text that says With google, you’re likely to get a lot of results, but many of them may only mention your keywords passingly and may not be relevant to your topic at all. Because databases search the “profile” or metadata of a resource for keywords, it’s far more likely that you will get more results that specifically focus on your keywords throughout the entire content of the source.

When you search a web tool like Google, you are searching every word of every page of every document, from beginning to end. There are no rules about what goes into Google, so you get a mix of everything.  And, Google can't always tell the difference between a page or article that is all about your topic, and a page or article that mentions your topic only once or twice. 

When you search in the library research tools, like the catalog or (most) research databases, you are actually just searching short "profiles" of the book, article, or other source that you are looking at, rather than the whole source. Because the profiles are very short, searching for entire sentences or phrases does not usually work well in library resources.

But, if a source comes up because its profile mentions your topic, it's much more likely that the source will actually be on your topic. And while the research tools have many different types of sources in them, they're all published sources, so they've been checked for quality on at least a very basic level.