20.4: Identifying Keywords and Using Boolean Logic

Turning the Research Question into Key Terms

You shouldn’t start your research by just typing into a database search box a question like, “What were medical practices like during the Battle of Gettysburg?” Instead, you should make use of key terms, or words that will appear frequently in the source.

Start by examining your research question and circling its most important terms. These are “key terms.” To search key terms, think about important words that will occur in sources you could use. Then, type one or two of those terms into the search bar. Most search engines will generate results based on how frequently those words appear in articles and their abstracts.

Let’s use our topic of medical practices at the Battle of Gettysburg from our previous discussion of narrowing a topic as an example. You might choose keywords like “amputation,” “field medicine,” and “Gettysburg.” This should yield articles that discuss amputations on the field during the Battle of Gettysburg. You could also search something like “anesthesia” and “Civil War,” which would lead you to articles about anesthetics during the war.

While searching with key terms, you may need to get creative. Some articles will use different language than you might expect, so try a variety of related terms to make sure you’re getting back all the possible results. Consider looking up synonyms for your existing key terms in a thesaurus. Let’s look at an example.

Suppose you are asked to write an essay in support of this question:

How has the accessibility of fast food led to the national problem of obesity?

It’s not a good idea to type in the entire sentence in your search, as there are many irrelevant words in this search statement. Before typing, decide which words or phrases are essential to your search and which are non-essential.  There are only two concepts in this statement that are essential to its meaning: fast food and obesity. You can eliminate the word “accessibility” because it describes the essential concept of fast food and the phrase “national problem” is not crucial because we assume any article talking about “fast food” and “obesity” will discuss some negative aspect that would represent a national problem.

Exercise 20.4: Identifying Key Terms

1.        To what extent have harsher legal penalties and virus detection software been useful in   slowing the spread of computer viruses?

Write key terms here:

2.        What is the effect of the media on the body image of young adults?

Write key terms here:

 

Using Boolean Logic

Another useful strategy you can incorporate to narrow your search results is a tool called Boolean Logic. Boolean operators are used to combine keywords as you search through a database. Adding words like “AND,” “OR,” or “NOT” can impact your results in significant ways. We can use our earlier research question to get a sense of how Boolean logic might work.

• active reading AND educational attainment: this result would retrieve sources that mention both active reading and educational attainment (this Boolean operator would be helpful if you wanted to make sure you focused only on sources that looked at the specific relationship between these two elements).
• active reading OR educational attainment: this search would retrieve sources that mention either active reading or educational attainment (this Boolean operator would be Chapter 13: Finding and Engaging with Sources 163 helpful if you wanted to focus on these elements in isolation before you thought about how they worked together).
• active reading NOT educational attainment: this search would retrieve sources that mention active reading but not sources that mention educational attainment (this Boolean operator would be helpful if you wanted to study the impact of active reading in isolation before considering how it affects educational attainment more specifically).

You can also use more complex Boolean indicators like quotation marks, parentheses, and asterisks to narrow your search results even further.

Quotation marks You can use quotation marks to search for exact phrases; this stops a search engine from splitting the phrase into single separate words. For example, the search “Student Loan Assistance” will only return results that feature that exact phrase; the search Student Loan Assistance, however, will return results that may feature “student,” “loan,” or “assistance” separate from one another. Parentheses You can place parentheses around your OR statements to emphasize that you are looking for one of a few specific words in your results. For example, you might type (university OR higher education OR college). Asterisks You can use an abbreviation with an asterisk next to it to find results for any variation of a word without using the “OR” function. For example, if you type in admin*, you will receive results including words like administration, administrator, administer, administered, etc. Now that you’ve embarked on the journey of source-location, you’re ready to focus on some specifics. See this page for more help with Boolean search techniques from MIT.

See this page from MIT for more help with Boolean search techniques.

Troubleshooting, Saving, and Citing

If you search the broader web for articles and find an academic one, you might encounter what's called a "pay wall." A pay wall blocks your access to a particular text until you have paid for it. As a student with access to your college's databases, you should be able to access most articles without paying any extra money for them, but you must access them through the Butler Library Databases using your Pipeline credentials to log in to the system. Once you find an article about your topic, you should read its abstract (generally found at the beginning of the article) so that you can ascertain the main points of the article and determine whether it will be useful as a source for your project. If you determine that the source will, in fact, be useful, you can save it to return to later.

Most Butler databases feature a "Cite This" button that allows you to generate an appropriate citation for a source depending on the style your instructor has asked you to follow. If you choose to use this generator, you will need to scroll to the appropriate style, so the citation shows up in the correct format. Once you’ve chosen the style—checking that you’ve also chosen the correct edition of the style, such as MLA 9th edition rather than MLA 8th or 7th —you need to click “change,” and then click “done.” If you forget these steps, your citation may remain in the default format. If you choose to use this shortcut, you still bear the responsibility of making sure that the software has returned a correctly-formatted result.