WR121 Davis

1. Fill out your topic.
2. Circle the main ideas that comprise your topic.
3. Write those main ideas in the "Round 1 Keywords" box.
4. Pass your paper to someone else, who will brainstorm more keywords.
5. Pass the paper to someone else again, who will brainstorm more keywords.
6. Pass the paper back to the original owner.

Once you have identified keywords, you can apply basic search strategies to them.

The most important basic search strategy is putting quotation marks around phrases. 

What do quotation marks do?

Quotation marks tell the search engine to search for that exact phrase instead of searching for the words separately.

• Phrases are single topic ideas that use more than one word to describe them, like "forest fires."
• Phrases have meanings and context that search engines do not understand until you put quotation marks around them.
  • Example: My topic is about "climate change" (long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns), not change in climate (a phrase used in relation to evolving work, school, or cultural environments).

You do not need to add quotation marks around single words.

Keywords (also called search terms) are words that describe your research topic. Keywords are chosen by you. Keyword searching is how you search in Google and Bing. You think of important words or phrases, type them into a search box, and get results.

• Pros: Easy.
• Cons: Not very precise. Results in a lot of irrelevant and useless search results.

Subjects (also called controlled vocabulary) are words that an article has been tagged with because the article is mostly about those subjects. Subjects are a quick way to find the most relevant articles on a topic, but you have to be careful because the only place the database searches for those words is in that Subject field. If you don't have the right words to search with, you'll get no results. You find Subjects listed in articles that are relevant to your topic, type them into a search box, change the "field to search" to Subject, and get results.

• Pros: Results in relevant, topic-specific results. You will see way fewer irrelevant or useless results.
• Cons: Harder - subjects may not be phrases you would think of off the top of your head.