English Writing 300 - College Composition (Rauschkolb)

One of the greatest challenges in starting a new research project is deciding which search terms best describe your topic as you begin the search for resources.  Try to be really succinct/to the point and use just a couple of keywords instead of typing long sentences. The video explains all of this quickly (less than 2 minutes!), so please watch it now. Here are few more tips:

• Enter keywords that represent your topic:   
• Limit searches to two or three keywords:  for profit prison       
• Don't search with sentences, questions, or long phrases.
• Combine terms with OR to broaden:  
  incarceration OR imprisonment (these would find items with either of these terms)
• Combine terms with AND to narrow:  education AND recidivism (this would find items with education and recidivism)
• Place quotation marks around words you wish to be searched as a phrase: "incarceration rate"

One of the greatest challenges in starting a new research project is deciding which search terms best describe your topic as you begin the search for resources.  Try to be really succinct/to the point and use just a couple of keywords instead of typing long sentences. The video explains all of this quickly (less than 2 minutes!), so please watch it now. Here are few more tips:

• Enter keywords that represent your topic:   
• Limit searches to two or three keywords:  education race bias       
• Don't search with sentences, questions, or long phrases.
• Combine terms with OR to broaden:  
  housing discrimination OR housing bias (these would find items with either of these phrases)
• Combine terms with AND to narrow:  health care AND implicit bias (this would find items with health care and implicit bias)
• Place quotation marks around words you wish to be searched as a phrase: "implicit bias"

Video by CRC Library