INTRODUCTION:
In this third week we have been learning about selecting keywords, that means when you are starting to formulate your first question it can be useful to brain storm words that are synonymous or related to the major concept of your topic as well narrower as broader term. try to create a hierarchy of concepts of your topic it will give you more flexibility when searching different types of data bases or catalogs.....You now know some of the best resources to use for identifying, narrowing and focusing topics. Once you have a topic you need to select some terms, called "keywords," that you can use to search for information relating to your topic.
Look at the following examples of narrowed research topics with the keywords highlighted :
What has caused the implementation of salary caps in professional sport?
What effect did the assault weapons ban have on the crime rate?
What role should the courts play in right-to-die cases?
You need to select keywords due to the way most search interfaces work. The words you enter will be compared to the words in the records being searched. If you enter too many words you are likely to receive few, if any results.
For example:
If you enter "What role should the courts play in the right-to-die cases," any articles returned will need to have many or all of those words somewhere in the record describing the article. In one of our larger databases, employing all of these words in the search does not retrieve any articles, but using the words "courts right-to-die" returns 435 articles.
Library Services:
The O.P.A.C search form allows searching by any combination of author, title, subject/keyword, date or format. Items that do not indicate a holding location have not been barcoded, indicating that they may not be available.
These subject headings are sometimes called index terms or descriptors. The library has copies of the printed volume and the thesaurus is also available online, searchable from within the database.
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