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Search Techniques

Keyword Searching

How it works

Keyword searching permits you to search a database for the occurrence of specific words or terms, regardless of where they may appear in the database record. For example, even if the word appears in the middle of the title of an article, or anywhere in the abstract, you can still search for it.

Keyword searching was made possible by computers; essentially, the computer looks for any group of characters that has a space on either side if it, considers it a "word," and indexes it. The computer takes this task very literally. Even typos, ("philosopy,"), incorrect spellings ("archeaology"), or words that were accidently typed together without a space between them ("forexample"), will be found by the computer and indexed, exactly the way they appear.

Advantages of keyword searching

There are many advantages to keyword seaching:

you can locate a very specific reference, even if it is only mentioned a single time
you can use the most current terminology, jargon, or "buzzwords" being used in a discipline, even when no official subject headings exist yet for the concept
you can combine keywords in various ways to create a very detailed and specificsearch query; the actual search as you enter it is known as a search statement