INTD 105: Coming of Age in Life and Literature (Maher): Locate Sources

Keyword is a library term for any word that represents a concept that you are searching for. When you type a word into any database, you want to use keywords.

Keywords tend to be:

• Nouns or verbs
• Single words or short phrases
• Vitally important to the concept you are looking for.
  • In other words, if you took them out you would have a different topic.

Keywords are almost never:

• Connecting words like "the" "it" "then
• Special search terms like "and" "or" or "not" (More on this later)

Please watch this video tutorial for some tips on searching for literary criticism in the databases. This video is closed captioned and you can make it larger by clicking on the double-arrow icon on the bottom right corner of the video.

When you are searching in a database, remember that these resources think differently from you. You need to use special terms to get the database to give you good information.

If you want to connect two concepts, use the word AND. That will give you a list of articles that contain both the concepts you connect.

If you want to look for multiple independent concepts, use the word OR. That will take each word you connect and give you a list of articles that contains either or both concepts.

Some databases also use NOT to exclude information. If you use NOT, the list of articles should remove all articles with the word after NOT.