Public Administration

Never use sentence structure, such as your research question or thesis statement.

A keyword is a word used to search library catalogs (GIL-Find, GIL-Find Universal), article databases (GALILEO), and web search engines (Google Scholar) in order to locate results that match that word in a specified part or in any part of the item, such as the title or in the full text. Once you have identified your key search concepts, start noting down some related terms or synonyms to your key concepts.

Use a general thesaurus, subject dictionaries, subject encylopedias, and subject headings to help you formulate keywords. 

This video may be a little silly - it does feature a sock puppet - but it explains well how to choose keywords from your research question and how to search in databases. 

Boolean searching involves adding or subtracting terms from your search to either broaden or narrow your search. It uses 3 terms (AND, OR, and NOT) to tell the search engine or database whether to include or eliminate certain terms.

AND narrows your search, only finding articles with both terms. Using AND means fewer, more precise results.

OR broadens your search. OR is good to use between keywords that mean the same thing. Remember, not all authors will use the exact same words for the same concept!

NOT takes out a search term that is not relevant to your research. 

Quotation marks can be used to identify phrases.

By using quotations marks, you are telling the computer to only bring back pages with the terms you typed in the exact order you typed them.

“Industrial Management”
Instead of
industrial AND management

“Urban Transportation Policy”
Instead of
Urban AND Transportation AND Policy

“Enviromental Risk Assessment”
Instead of 
Environmental AND Risk AND Assessment

Truncation allows you to search various forms of a word by finding alternate endings.The character (*) is placed at the end of the first few letters of a search term or at the end of its root.

Organiz* retrieves

Organizing

Organized

Organization

Organizations

Organizational