Define your Keywords
Once you have defined your topic, the second step is to take each idea in turn and think of all the possible words and their synonyms that could be used to describe the idea:
- Use an index or thesaurus to help you find useful terms
- Think about possible sysonyms - are there alternative words that could be used
- Are there variations in spelling?
- You might want to think about broader or narrower terms that you could choose
- There might have been changes in terminology over time. Is this something that could affect your search?
In our earlier example, pollution from car exhausts: air, atmospheric, car, automobile, automobiles would be possible keywords.
- User OR to search these words together, for e.g.,
- air pollution OR atmospheric pollution (Set 1)
- car OR cars OR automobile OR automobiles (Set 2)
The OR logic broadens your search, so that you can find as much as possible on your topic.
On most online systems you can use truncation to save typing the variations of a single word.
- Truncation symbols can vary: * is the most common
- So for example: car* will find either ‘car’ or ‘cars’
Figure 1: diagram showing how the OR logic broadens your search
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