You have just met with your research supervisor. For the next meeting, they ask you to pull together twenty articles from the main authors in your topic area. They recommend using a keyword search to source this material. As this was only your second meeting, you were too embarrassed to ask the obvious question: “How to devise suitable keywords for a literature search?”
Keywords are words or phrases that represent the main themes and concepts for your research topic. They serve a dual function. First, acting as a form of shorthand to help you understand your topic. Second, enabling you to establish if the material you are sourcing is relevant to your research.
Searching aimlessly tends to uncover a multitude of resources. The process can often be time consuming and frustrating. You spend hours, often wasteful, looking at, reading and studying each result. It is like entering a muddled address into a mobile mapping service, and then following all the options presented to you, whether valid or not. You then discover every possible address by means of a back alley or cul-de-sac (comparable to a confused keyword search). Therefore, what you need to do is to follow the main highways to secure the specific details for your preferred location (comparable to an orderly keyword search).
We suggest you take nine steps to devise suitable keywords for an orderly literature search:
- Record your preliminary thoughts to generate broad concepts and phrases.
- Create a comprehensive list of relevant keywords from these initial ideas.
- Define each of these keywords (AI tutors, prompts and study tools can assist your deliberations).
- Redefine in greater detail what each of the keywords mean.
- Reduce the extensive list of preliminary keywords to build a realistic long list.
- Rate each long list keyword by assigning a score (a value) to signify its worth.
- Rank each rated keyword to determine its relative position (its order).
- Find alternative spellings, synonyms (replacements) and antonyms (opposites) for all the higher rated and ranked keywords (you decide on how many).
- Obtain fuller, and more complete, definitions for all the higher rated and ranked keywords by drawing on specialist original and published sources linked to your topic.
- Review the literature based on these richly defined and applicable keywords.
Keep revising your search parameters, as required, so you locate increasingly more valuable material as you progressively examine the literature. This ratchet effect is most effective when you employ what are known as Boolean operators to search online. Boolean operators work in conjunction with the words you include in your search parameters. These are words or symbols you can utilise to expand or contract your results. Common operators are words like AND, OR, NOT.
To illustrate, you can apply Boolean operators as follows:
- AND – to combine keywords so that all search results include every one of your terms.
- OR – to combine substitute words or similar terms so that results include one or more of your terms.
- NOT – to exclude terms from your results.
One of our students, Maria Negro, who successfully completed her MSc Advanced Computing Networks, advises: “Use Boolean operators, words such as AND, OR and NOT, to define your search parameters. Incorporating one, or more, of these words widens or restricts results. The word AND expands your search results, while the word NOT narrows results.”
Be like Maria and effectively search for and access meaningful literature for your thesis, dissertation or capstone project. Knowing how to devise suitable keywords for a literature search is literally getting the key that opens the door to that material. You may find our Searching for Relevant Literature Toolbook helpful. It contains useful activities and practical checklists that builds your skills to source worthwhile literature.
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