Keywords are the words that you type into the search box to find resources about your topic. What are the most important words in your research question? Think of synonyms for those words.
Example: I am looking for evidence-based practice research about reminiscense and dementia.
PRO TIP: Breaking your search question up into concepts can help with developing keywords.
| Concept One | Concept Two | Concept Three | ||
| "evidence based" | AND | reminiscence | AND | dementia |
| OR | OR | |||
| "case study" | AND | "memory recall" | AND |
After you have decided on your keywords, you'll need to tell the database how they should be connected.
| AND |
reminiscence AND dementia Will find resources that have both reminiscence and dementia as keywords. |
| OR |
(reminiscence OR "memory recall") Will find resources with reminiscence OR "memory recall" as keywords |
| NOT |
dementia NOT "multiple sclerosis" Will find resources with the keyword dementia and NOT "multiple sclerosis" |
After you decide on your keywords and how they connect to each other, you should come up with a few search strategies that you'll try in the databases.
dementia AND reminiscence
dementia AND (reminiscence OR "memory recall")
Truncation can be used with root words that have multiple endings. It can help to increase your search results.
Truncation uses symbols (or wildcards) to replace letters in words. Different databases use different symbols. The most common are:
* (asterisk) ? (question mark) #(pound sign)
EBSCO databases use * (asterisk)
Example: evaluat* would find: evaluation, evaluate, evaluates, evaluating
Nesting is another way to refine your search, by combining Boolean operators. Place parenthesis around the terms that are grouped with OR or NOT.
dementia AND (reminiscence OR "memory recall")