Library Research Skills: Strategies for Effective Research: Finding Search Terms

Once you've successfully created a narrow research question, you'll probably want to go ahead and start finding information about your question! However, it's not a good idea to type your entire research question into the search bar of a database like EBSCOhost or our library catalog. If you do this, changes are that the database or catalog will tell you there are 0 books or articles on your topic. This is not because the library does not have books or articles on the ethics of producing genetically modified organisms, but because the search engine you're using is not smart enough to understand what you're typing in.

Instead, you need to break your research question down into search terms that describe your topic. Search terms are short (1-4 words) phrases that describe the main concepts of your topic. A good way to choose search terms for your topic is to look at your research question and decide what the most important words are in that sentence. A good research question will have 2-4 search terms that describe it.

It's also smart to have a few back-ups in mind for each search term. Sometimes the database will only give you a couple of results when you put in one word, but if you think of a synonym for that search term, you will get many more results.