Information Literacy, Level One

We’re often used to searching in Google with full questions, such as, How have women chefs used cuisine to highlight community and culture in the South? In library resources like OneSearch, you don’t need to type in a full question. You only need to use the key concepts of your question. For example, this is how you might select keywords from the research question below:

Identifying the key concepts is an important first step.  But you also need to realize that the authors of books and articles about your topic might use different terms than the ones you've chosen.  If you don't search those other terms, you may not find those sources. A search with smell memory brain and a search with fragrance remember mind may produce different results.

Use quotation marks for phrase searching

If you have a keyword that’s a multi-word phrase (such as "birth control" or "social media"), put the phrase in quotation marks in your search.  This will ensure that the library search tool will only find sources that use those words as a phrase. Other examples include:

• "higher education"
• "climate change"
• "mental health"
• "fast fashion"
• "video games"
• "low income"

Usually, when you enter multiple keywords into a search, the search engine will bring back documents that contain all of those words. So, if you use more keywords in your search, you will get fewer results because you’re being more specific in your search. 

If you’re getting too many results, add more keywords for a more precise search.

If your searches are giving you too few results, remove keywords from your search to make it broader.

Here are some examples of how to narrow or broaden a search: