Biology & Microbiology: Identifying Keywords

One of the most important things to remember about library research databases is that they do not function like search engines such as Google. Google is most useful when you're looking for quick facts and simple questions. This is not the case for research, which by nature is much more complex. The algorithms used by search engines to index websites and return search results are vastly different than any of the algorithms used by research databases. Google works well when you ask your questions as phrases (i.e., "how many COVID-19 cases have been reported in Ohio", "why is chocolate deadly to dogs"), but research databases work best when you search using keyword strings. 

Brainstorming possible keywords is the next thing you should do after identifying your research question. It has a couple of steps:

1. Break your topic down into broad subtopics
2. Identify synonyms and related terms/phrases for each subtopic

Your lists of synonyms and related terms are the keywords you'll need to begin your literature search. (Depending on your assignment, you may have been given an initial list of suggested keywords for your topic, but they are very likely to be insufficient. You'll want to add to them so you can more easily find relevant information.)

Video Tutorial: Topic Breakdown

Let's say I'm interested in researching respiration in salamanders. This question can be broken down into two main ideas: respiration and salamanders.

From here, I need to brainstorm additional keywords and synonyms for each of these subtopics. (Hint: here is where Google and Wikipedia can be useful, particularly for finding taxonomic information (e.g., genus, family, order). You shouldn't ever cite them as an authoritative source, but they are great tools for learning more about unfamiliar topics.)

This table lists some of the keywords I came up with for each of the two subtopics.