Trek 1:
Analysing your Topic
Trek 3:
Understanding your reading list
Trek 4:
Using the library catalogue 1
Trek 5:
Using the library catalogue 2
Trek 6:
Finding journal articles
Trek 7:
Searching the Web
Trek 8:
Evaluating resources
Trek 9:
Referencing
Trek 10:
Using library services from home
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Once you've worked out the main concepts of your topic, you need to look for alternative terms or keywords that describe each concept to use as search terms.
This Trek gives you some hints on how to find keywords.
Define and understand your concepts
Why do we need keywords?
Where do we look for keywords?
How to combine keywords
Link to online dictionaries and thesauri
Once you've worked out your concepts it is always helpful to get a clear definition of the terms.
You can use a variety of dictionaries and encyclopaedias for this. Libraries always have general English dictionaries where you can find a short definition, and often have special subject dictionaries and encyclopaedias, in business, medicine or computing etc, to give you more in-depth definitions and background information. (Note: Most libraries keep dictionaries and encyclopaedias in their Reference Collections and you usually cannot borrow them).
For example, here is a short definition of the term "physiotherapy" from the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary:
"the treatment of disease, injury, deformity, etc., by physical methods including manipulation, massage, infrared heat treatment, remedial exercise, etc., not by drugs."
In Mosby's Medical, Nursing, & Allied Health Dictionary (4th ed.) the entry for "physiotherapy" says see "physical therapy". The definition of "physical therapy is:
"the treatment of disorders with physical agents and methods, such as massage, manipulation, therapeutic exercises, cold, heat (including shortwave, microwave, and ultrasonic diathermy), hydrotherapy, electric stimulation, and light to assist in rehabilitating patients and in restoring normal function after an illness or injury. Also called physiotherapy.
These definitions also help us identify some alternative keywords for our terms.
You may be wondering why we need to find alternative terms for our concepts.
When you search library catalogues, journal databases and the World Wide Web, a computer searches for references with the term you type in. Unfortunately, computers will ONLY search for that term and you may miss lots of useful information in other references. So to search effectively, you may need to search on several alternative terms or keywords.
In the example above, we also found out that the term "physiotherapy" is not used in the Mosby's Dictionary and "physical therapy" is used instead - this is the American term. You need to remember that terms can vary from country to country.
Spelling can also vary from country to country. For example: "colour" and "color", "programme" and "program", "behaviour" and "behavior", "organisation" and "organization".
As we have already seen, you can find alternative keywords in general and subject dictionaries. Based on the definitions for the term "physiotherapy" above, alternative keywords could be:
physical therapy
remedial exercise
therapeutic exercises
manipulation
massage
etc.
Another useful resource to check is a thesaurus, a publication that gives synonyms. You can look at a general thesaurus like the Macquarie Thesaurus, or check a specialised thesaurus. The specialised thesauri are very useful when you are searching a database for journal articles. (Find out more in Trek 6: Finding journal articles).
Here is the Macquarie Thesaurus entry for "physiotherapy":
manipulationYou can see that we have some more terms that we could use as alternative keywords. HOWEVER, you don't need to use them all!
massage
massotherapy
mechanotherapy
orthoptic exercises
physio
So far we have discussed finding keywords for a particular concept, but generally we want to find resources that contain more than one term or concept. To do this we need to combine terms using a specific style of phrasing known as Boolean (Boo-lee-an) operators.
If we want to look for several different terms in the same reference we use the operator "AND" (for 'as well as'). For example if our topic was "energy conservation at home and at work", the phrase would be:
energy conservation AND home AND workWe are asking the computer to search for references with all of these terms.
If we have some alternative terms for each keyword we use the operator OR (for either...or ).
For example:
energy conservation OR energy efficiency OR energy saving
Here we are asking the computer to search for any of these terms.
Now that you've done this Trek, try the InfoTrekker Quiz to test your knowledge, then go on to the next Trek 3 Understanding your reading list.
