The Foundation of Your Search Strategy: Keywords

If you completed the Keyword creation module, you’ll know that keywords really do matter. Before you start researching, take some time to identify keywords related to your topic or question. If we take the example topic statement from the quick check on the last page, “Eating a vegetarian diet benefits personal health as well as the environment,” we can come up with a list of relevant keywords, including: vegetarian, plant-based, health, nutrition, weight, environment, sustainability, and climate change. As you engage in the research process, you may identify new keywords based on concepts that come up often. That's great! Add those to your keyword brainstorming list. It’s important that we think about the relationships between these terms as we brainstorm. For example, vegetarian and plant-based actually mean something similar, but vegetarian and health are two separate concepts that would have to be connected. On the next page, we will use search connectors to help us represent those relationships in a search string.

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