When searching a database or the library catalog, use the following recommended keywords or subject words for African-American studies material:
"African-American" OR "Afro-American"
Using quotation marks " " around a string of words will instruct the database to search for your terms as a phrase. For example, "african american" is searched as a phrase and not as individual words.
Use "boolean operators" such as and, or, not to establish relationships between concepts. And retrieves documents that contains all of your concepts. Or retrieves documents that contains one or more of your concepts.Not eliminates documents that contains concepts you wish to avoid
SPECIAL NOTE: In many databases, the use of the wildcard * retrieves documents containing various forms your term. For example, shop* searches for shop OR shopper(s) OR shopping and other variations of the term. The use of the wildcard is known as truncation.
AND is a connector that requires both words to be present in each record in the results. Use AND to narrow your search.
| Search Term | Hits |
|---|---|
| Television | 999 hits |
| Violence | 876 hits |
| Television and violence | 123 hits |
The words 'television' and 'violence' will both be present in each record.
OR is a connector that allows either word to be present in each record in the results. Use OR to expand your search.
| Search Term | Hits |
|---|---|
| Adolescents | 97 hits |
| Teenagers | 75 hits |
| Adolescents or teenagers | 172 hits |
Either 'adolescents' or 'teenagers' (or both) will be present in each record.
NOT is a connector that requires the first word be present in each record in the results, but only if the record does not contain the second word.
| Search Term | Hits |
|---|---|
| High school | 423 hits |
| Elementary | 652 hits |
| High school not Elementary | 275 hits |
Each record contains the words 'high school', but not the word 'elementary'.
Keywords are the words that describe your topic of research. These can be individual words or a phrase. These keywords can be chosen from the sentence you create to define your research topic. Once you choose the significant words, you can then come up with synonyms, or words with similar meanings. All of these can be keywords to use in forming your search.
Keyword searching is available in almost all databases. Many databases require you to explicitly describe the relationship between keywords using special connectors to associate your keywords in various relationships.
Example:
You've chosen the topic "alternative fuels" for a research paper. To help you focus this rather broad topic, you put it into the form of a question or sentence:
What are the types of alternative fuels being used or developed for automobiles?
Usually, the nouns and adjectives in your sentence or question will give you a good idea of what your keywords will be. In this case, the phrase "alternative fuels" and "automobiles" are the significant keywords.
From these keywords make a list of synonyms to use as alternatives. Since different writers will describe the same thing using different words, it's good to arm yourself with a variety of keywords so you don't miss important information.
| alternative fuels | automobiles |
|---|---|
| electricity ethanol natural gas hydrogen fuel cells |
cars vehicles transportation motor vehicle |
You probably would need to do some background reading before coming up with some of the terms you see above.
EXAMPLE OF A TOPIC: RACIAL PROFILING OF AFRICAN AMERICANS WHILE SHOPPING
SEARCH STRATEGY:
"racial profil*"
AND
"african american*" OR black*
AND
shop* OR store* OR retail*
NOT
"Black Friday"
"racial profil*" AND ("african american*" OR black*) AND (shop* OR store* OR retail") NOT ("Black Friday")