2.3.1: Choosing keywords

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Now we know that keywords are the most important words for our topic. But how do we go from a topic to a list of keywords to search with?

You saw in my example that I chose my keywords directly out of my research question: What are the impacts of social media addiction on teenagers?

Your topic sentence or research question is a great place to start when creating your list of keywords. But you don't want to stop there, you'll want to brainstorm a good list of keywords with multiple options that you can search with. Why? Because everyone is different! And people often use different words to describe the same thing.

Let's use my example topic again.

I've picked out my keywords: social media, addiction, teenagers. Those are some pretty good keywords, but what if someone writes an article titled The link between Instagram dependency and depression in adolescents?! That article sounds like it would be amazing for my research- but it doesn't use the same words as I did to describe my topic! How am I going to find that article if I only use my original keywords? I'll need to have a list of keywords to search with that includes alternative keywords.

Alternative keywords are additional keywords that you can search with in place of your original keywords. From the above example, the author used Instagram in the title, which is a good alternative keyword for social media (because Instagram is an example of a social media platform!). I also see adolescent as an alternative keyword for teenagers and dependency as an alternative keyword for addiction.

I bet that if I did some brainstorming I could come up with even more alternative keywords for my topic.

Watch this video for a review of why keywords are important and how they fit into the research process:

Selecting & Using Keywords from Joshua Vossler on Vimeo.