Library databases work best when you choose keywords instead of using sentences or full research questions. When creating keywords think about:
For example, my research question: Does drinking alcohol negatively affect college student grades in the United States?
My research keywords become: alcohol, college student, grades, United states
Once your start searching databases using your keywords, you may not get as many results as you want. This means that the sources may be using different words to describe their articles, books, and studies. When this happens, you need to develop more keywords. You can develop more keywords by:
When searching using your basic keywords, you may find articles that look helpful to your research. From these articles you can look at the subject and abstract to find more keywords.
Subjects are related words assigned to the article to help you find it. Subjects are usually linked so you can select the subject and find similar articles.
An abstract is a summary of the article. This is helpful to read to see if an article is relevant to your research.
Let's look at an article we found using our basic keywords in OneSearch called "Longitudinal influence of alcohol and marijuana use on academic performance in college students".
The abstract says "Post-hoc analysis suggest that at the outset, compared to sober peers, students using moderate to high levels of alcohol and low marijuana demonstrate lower GPAs, but this difference becomes non-significant over time" and that "Overall, our study validates and extends the current literature by providing important implications of concurrent alcohol and marijuana use on academic achievement in college.
This means that this article is relevant to our research (effects of alcohol on student GPAs). We also get keywords like GPA and academic achievement. The listed subjects for this article include:
A thesaurus is a reference resource that shows you words that have similar meanings. For research, this means you can use a thesaurus to find other keywords similar to those in your research topic.
Let's use our example research keyword "college student" and a thesaurus to find more keywords. Using thesaurus.com, instead of college student we can search using: undergraduate student, undergrad, first year, and more
Other Thesauri to use:
An encyclopedia is a reference resource that shows you generally accepted, credible background information about a topic. For research, this means you can learn more about a broad topic and see words that people use to talk about that topic.
Let's use our example research topic about college student grades and alcohol in an encyclopedia to find more keywords. Using our Credo Reference Collection of encyclopedias, there is an encyclopedia entry from The Encyclopedia of Addictions and Addictive Behaviors on college students and addiction:
From this encyclopedia entry, we have new keywords like binge drinking and drinking culture as well as actual articles too look at in the Further Information section:
Here's a few more encyclopedias to search for keywords:
Reference books including dictionaries, encyclopedias, quotations, and atlases, plus a wide range of subject-specific reference titles.
Searchable collection of over 500 electronic reference books including dictionaries and subject encyclopedias.
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