LibGuides: Life Sciences and IBERS: Identifying search terms

Define your terms

Before you start

Consider 3 questions:

What sort of information do I need?
Where should I look for information?
How can I search effectively so that I find relevant materials - what search terms or keywords will find this information?

Highlight the key terms or keywords in your assignment question. Think carefully about suitable keywords that will enable you to find manageable amounts of relevant material - not so many results to cause information overload, or so few that you retrieve insufficient information.

Search terms

Keywords are the key!

Whatever you want to call them - keywords / key terms / search words / search terms - they all have the same aim!

And that aim is to search and find relevant material.

Selecting the right keywords from the assignment brief can greatly improve the accuracy and relevance of your search results.

Use the assignment question to start collecting keywords that will be useful in your search
Be concise - start with only 2-3 essential keywords
To find relevant keywords, conduct some brief background research. Take note of the terms commonly used when discussing the topic.

Here are top tips for choosing effective keywords:

Get rid of unnecessary words and phrases
Streamline your concepts
Use neutral language to get more balanced search results
Watch out for typos and misspellings.
Consider key concepts and themes not explicitly mentioned in the question

Synonyms or alternative search terms

Think about alternative words/phrases or synonyms you should include in your search in order to improve your search results.

For example:

If you were researching the failure of small business in the UK you could use the following keywords:

failure, success, demise, challenges, risk.

As well as searching for the UK, you might also search for:

United Kingdom, GB, Great Britain.

Use a thesaurus for synonyms: https://www.powerthesaurus.org/

Some databases have a built-in thesaurus you can use to find alternative terms.

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Think about if you can use acronyms or abbreviations in your search. These can be included in your search terms in order to find matching results.

For example:

AIDS and/or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
Doctor and/or Dr

Have a look at the following websites to find more abbreviations and acronyms:

Abbreviations.com
- There are over 230,000 entries and 81 categories such as business, medicine, science and international abbreviations and acronyms.
Acronym Finder
- Acronym Finder is a searchable dictionary of over 330,000 acronyms and abbreviations.

Terminology variations

hink about differences in spellings and terminology, and use alternatives into your search strategy.

For example:

globalisation (British spelling)
globalization (American English spelling)

Wildcard symbols can help with this:

globali?ation will search and find globalisation and globalization
organi?e will search and find organise and organize

See 'Using symbols ?' box in the right hand column for further information on how to do this.