Understanding Keywords

It may be tempting to simply type your research question into a search box to find sources, but that won't yield the best results. Instead, you'll want to focus on the concepts at the heart of your question first. You will use these core concepts to generate several relevant keywords that will better focus your search results.

Keywords act as an informative word (or phrase) used in an information retrieval system (such as Primo Links to an external site.) to indicate the content you would like to discover.

Keywords vs Natural Language

• Natural language searching is searching in full sentences or phrases like you would ask a person "how many feet are in a yard?" Natural language is how most people search Google and other search engines but this type of searching will not work well with Library Databases or Primo.
• Keyword searching is searching using individual words often taken from the key ideas in a natural language search. Keyword searching in databases usually searches the entire record or full text for your terms and will allow for a large number of results. Seemingly irrelevant results occur when your key word is found deep within a record. Using common words in a Keyword search will result in an overwhelming number of results. By adding additional keywords, a search can become more focused.

Keywords and Phrases

While the name keyword implies that they are limited to a single word, a phrase may often be more appropriate. For example, when searching for information about types of clothing, you may want to search phrases such as “t-shirt”, “ballroom gown”, or “button down shirt”.

Just remember that when searching a phrase, most searches require the use of quotation marks (“ ”) to indicate that the words within the quotes are searched together instead of searching each term individually.