Search Term Selection
A search term is any word or phrase that is significant or meaningful to your topic. These are the terms you type into the search box of a search engine. Usually, a search term is a noun or an adjective, and sometimes a verb, that are concrete concepts. Avoiding certain terms eliminate irrelevant or unfocused search results.
Before choosing search terms, you should articulate
your information need. Having a clear idea of the scope
of your topic and what, if any, aspects of the subject area you
wish to focus on make it easier to search for information. Use your thesis statement or concept map to highlight the significant
words and phrases that convey the major concepts.
The next step is to create more search terms. Once you have multiple terms you will combine these search terms together in your search statements.
| Examples of related words | |||
| Global | international | multinational | worldwide |
| Standards | policy, policies | guidelines | protocols |
| Environment | ecology | wildlife | ecosystem, ecosystems |
| Protection | protect, protecting | conservation, conserving | regulation, regulating |
Search Terms to Avoid
Some words entered into your search statement may prevent you from retrieving effective search results. The following types of terms are best avoided when selecting your search terms.
Stopwords are words that have a high frequency of use in the English language. Called stopwords because they can slow down or invalidate a search. Many databases and search engines are programmed to ignore these words. Examples:
- articles (a, an, the)
- prepositions (of, on, in, with)
- conjunctions (but, however)
Common words are often terms so heavily used in a given database that they will retrieve too many records to be useful. For example, using the search term "education" in the Education Full Text database would retrieve almost every record in that database.
Abstract words or concepts can be difficult to describe search terms, such as "causes of" or "impact on." These are a reflection, analysis, and evaluation of your research rather than a concrete, descriptive term. Use of these typically generate invalid search results. Some of the abstract terms to avoid include:
- impact
- influence
- importance
- effect
- development
- significance
- comparison
- contrast
- cause
- characteristics