Phrases
Enclose phrases in quotation marks, e.g.:
- "climate change"
- "social media marketing"
- "human resources"
- "supply chain management"
Identifying keywords
Step One: Create and write your specific research question, example:
Should employees in Canada be given unlimited vacation time?
Step Two: Create your search, focus on nouns only: people, places, things. These will be your keywords or phrases - not who, why, where, when, how or what.
- employees 2. vacation 3. Canada
Step Three: Identify synonyms or related words for each keyword or phrase. Remember to put any phrases in quotes, e.g.
You can find more synonyms or keywords using the Visual Thesaurus (see below) or Thesaurus.com .
Find word variations
Try adding an asterisk * to the root of any word to pick up other variations of the word:
- Canad* will also find Canada, Canada's, Canadian
- work* will also retrieve workplace, workers, worked, working
