Library Research Tutorial

In this section of the tutorial, you will learn how to:

• broaden or narrow a topic
• identify keywords for a topic
• use connectors and truncation in constructing a search
• understand the difference between keyword, subject, author, and title searching

Watch the video below to learn how to work with a topic idea to find a focus that isn't too broad or too narrow. ​

Video credit: Picking Your Topic IS Research by North Carolina State University Library

It's a good idea to choose a topic that interests you, something you'd like to know more about. For example, you could start with a topic that is very broad, like marketing. But you will find way too much information on this subject - enough to write several books. 

Instead, think of some aspect or sub-topic of the general subject of marketing that interests you. Maybe one of these?

• Internet marketing
• Green marketing
• Marketing to special groups

Let's say you are interested in marketing to special groups. 
You could narrow the topic even more by adding a sub-topic:

to an age group     →         Marketing to adolescents

a location       →                 Marketing in Japan

an additional topic    →       Marketing in magazines

It's helpful to write out your topic as a sentence or a question. Let's say the question that most interests you is:

How do advertisers market their products to teenagers?

Now you'll need to pick out the most important keywords for your searching. These are generally nouns.

How do advertisers market their products to teenagers?

You will want to take some time thinking about synonyms and subcategories related to the keywords in your research question. For example:

Words related to products:

• technology
• clothes/clothing
• electronic cigarettes/e-cigarette/vape

Words related to teenagers:

• adolescent/adolescents/adolescence
• young adult
• high school students
• college students

You can see that plurals are included. Try to think about alternate spellings of words or abbreviations, too. 

Watch the video below for more information about creating a concept map for brainstorming ideas. If you are a visual learner, this may be a great resource.

Video credit: Concept Mapping for Developing Your Research from Appalachian State University, Belk Library.

A keyword search looks for your search words anywhere in the "item record" - the data the makes the item findable in a database, including the title, abstract, author, subject, and description areas. It is the broadest type of search.

Keyword searching is flexible and allow you to use more than one search term.

For example: (teenagers OR young adults) AND advertising

Video Credit: Selecting and Using Keywords from Krueger Library at Winona State University

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) are used to connect keywords and concepts when searching. They are named after the Irish mathematician, George Boole.

Truncation

Truncation is like a wildcard. Added to the stem of a word, it will find that stem plus anything that comes after it. The symbol used to truncate a word depends upon the database or Web search engine you are using.  

environ*   ----   will return records on environment, environments, environmental. 
(* is used as the truncation symbol in MnPALS, Academic Search Premier, and many of the library databases.)