Keywords and Subject Terms

About Keywords

A keyword is a word that represents the main idea or feature of your topic, concept, or research statement.  You may have 3 to 5 keywords in your research statement and will develop lists of associated words and synonyms for each keyword.

Keywords are associated with synonyms.  A synonym is a word that has the same meaning as another word.  For example: "scared" and "afraid". Create synonym lists for each keyword.

Keywords and synonyms are essential for use in databases.

Where to find keywords?

Before you begin searching for information, you must identify keywords related to your topic. Find keywords:

• within your research question or thesis
• in encyclopedias used in background research
• in bibliographies found at the end of books and articles
• in a thesaurus (or in Word's thesaurus under the Review tab)
• by asking your library team

Online Thesaurus

Visuwords is an online graphical dictionary where users can look up words to find their relationships to other words. The website produces diagrams in a mind-map fashion that show associations between words. Each node of the mind-map is a word, which can be clicked on to discover its meaning, additional word associations, synonyms and antonyms.

Identifying Keywords

To select keywords to use for a search, start by writing your topic out as a sentence or question. For example:

"How are children impacted by explicit situations in the media?"

There are several aspects to this question. First, extract key terms from the topic question (bold). Then list synonymous or related terms for each - you have a list of keywords to use!

You will learn more about how to combine these terms and how to account for variations in spelling on the other pages of this guide.

Keyword Generator

Use this online keyword generator to create your lists in preparation to search online databases.