Keywords for Searching - Library Introduction - Education - CSP Library at Concordia University

Tutorial: Choosing and Using Keywords

Below are a few tips specific to choosing and using keywords for education research.

Give preference to the academic and professional keywords on your list before trying synonyms that are not in one of those categories. The research articles you are looking for will be more likely to use these types of terms.
Keywords relating to level in school are often useful to narrow to the population desired (e.g. early childhood, elementary, middle school, high school, etc.) but keywords relating to a specific grade level generally narrow results too much (e.g. third grade, tenth grade, etc.).
Try a variety of combinations of your keywords. Consider searches that look at your topic broadly, searches that look at all aspects of your topic, and searches that look at small parts of your topic. Example searches for the topic of; How does online bullying impact adolescent students?
- Bullying AND Online
- Bullying AND Online AND Adolescent
- Bullying AND (Online OR Social Media)
- Bullying AND (Adolescent OR Teenager OR High School OR Secondary)