What words should I type in when I'm looking for articles?

Answer

Article databases can have thousands, or even millions, of items stored within them, so you are right to be thinking carefully about what words to use when you are looking for articles.

Tips for choosing keywords

Use words, not sentences or questions.

A search like What are the benefits of a plant-based diet? will get results in Google, but it won't work too well in a library database. And although Google will give you results from this search, they may not be as helpful or as reliable or as easy to cite as what you will find in library article databases.

In an article database, type in only the main ideas. Like plant-based diet. Review your results, and maybe try again with plant-based diet benefits. Be prepared to experiment.

Be selective with your keywords.

The more words you use to search, the fewer results you get - if you enter seven words in the search box, you are telling the database that you want results that contain all seven of those words, and that may be difficult to find.

For example, a search like impact of gender on people's salary expectations will get far fewer results than gender AND salary AND expectations.

Brainstorm keywords that mean the same thing.

An article about salary may not use that exact word, so try similar words like wages, pay, income, compensation, or earnings. Searching for all of those terms together with OR between them (salary OR pay OR wages OR income OR earnings) tells the search engine that it's okay to find any of those words in your search results, rather than having to find all of them.

Borrow the words you see in your database search results.

After you try searching with a few keywords, take a look at the results you're getting. Do you see anything that applies to your topic? If so, look closely at that item's list of Subjects. Each item in a database is labeled with subjects that describe the main topics it talks about. So, if you use the database's subject labels as keywords in your search, you will find all the other items that talk about those particular topics.

Similarly, if you see particular words or phrases being used in the titles of several results, try using those words or phrases as keywords for your search. Sometimes, authors use words that are a bit different than the ones you might think of.