Keywords and Concepts
Selecting Keywords and Major Concepts
Identifying appropriate keywords or search terms is essential, to find the information that you need. Computers are programmed to match strings of characters and spaces and often do not know how to process search requests given in natural language (the language by which we speak). The databases’ search engines can’t guess at nuances in search terms, don’t read “subtexts” or discern ambiguity. To get the best search results possible, focus on essential words and concepts. (You will learn more about keywords in the upcoming module, “Searching.”)
| Keyword search | How Interpreted by Database or Search Engine |
| media |
Media cover events. Unless the media caused the event, this term is unnecessary. |
| Value words like “favorite,” “advantage,” and “better” are not useful if you need to gather evidence. These terms pick up other’s opinions, which may not be what you need. | |
| editorials |
Many databases and search engines are programmed to ignore common words that are not essential concepts. These are called “stopwords” and typically include terms such as, “the,” “from,” “about,” “when,” etc. |
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Activity: Selecting Keywords
