OCEAN 115 - Rachel Ridgway

Finding Keywords in a Research Question

Library databases work best when you choose keywords instead of using sentences or full research questions. When creating keywords think about:

• What are non-essential words? These words have no direct meaning for your topic. For example: the, Why, How, Does, and, etc.
• What are the big concepts or ideas involved? For example: COVID-19, pandemic, internet access, etc.
• Are there specific populations or people involved? For example: children, senior citizens, Black women, etc.
• Is there a specific place or environment? For example: California, high schools, swamps, etc.

Example Research Topic and Finding Keywords

For example, my research question: Does drinking alcohol negatively affect college student grades in the United States?

• Question: What are the words that have no meaning in my question?
• Answer: Does, drinking, negatively, affect, in, the

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:

• using one source and looking at the subjects and abstract
• using a thesaurus to find synonyms. Synonyms are words that have the same meaning.
• using an encyclopedia to find related words

Using Subjects & Abstracts

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:

• Academic achievement (another word for grades)
• teenagers (another word for college age students)
• university (another word for college)

Using A Thesaurus

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:

• ProQuest Thesaurus (select fourth bulleted item)
• Thesaurus.com
• Bloomsbury Thesaurus
• American Heritage Roget's Thesaurus

Using an Encyclopedia

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:

• Engwall, Douglas; Robert Hunter; Marvin Steinberg. “Gambling and Other Risk Behaviors on University Campuses.” Journal of American College of Health 52, no. 6 (May/June 2004): 245-255. 
• Hingson, Ralph, et al. “Age of First Intoxication, Heavy Drinking, Driving after Drinking and Risk of Unintentional Injury Among U.S. College Students.” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 64, no. 1 (2003): 23-31. 

Here's a few more encyclopedias to search for keywords: