Whether you’re just beginning a research project or refining an existing topic, a thoughtful search strategy can save time and lead you to more relevant sources. Effective searching begins with keywords—the words and phrases that capture the core concepts of your research question and that guide your entire research process. To identify them, look at your research question and brainstorm the main ideas. You can also think of them as the nouns in your question. Keywords can be a single word or multiple words.
Once you have your keywords, you’ll want to brainstorm alternative terms or synonyms for your keywords. These will help to expand your search if your original keywords are too limiting, or make it more precise if your original keywords are too broad.
After you have your keywords and alternative terms, you’re ready to search. Rather than typing your entire research question into the JSTOR search bar, use your keywords to guide your research. This tells the search system exactly what you want to find.
Keyword Search Tips
If your keywords contain multiple words, type them within quotation marks. This is called exact phrase searching and it tells the search system to search for the exact term within the quotation marks. For example, if your keyword is Shell shock and you type it without quotation marks, you may get results with the word shell at the beginning of a document and shock at the end, and they could have nothing to do with each other. But if you type “Shell shock”, you’ll get results that include that exact phrase.
Truncation, or shortening, is a way to expand your search and retrieve results that begin with the same string of letters. It can save you from having to type multiple, similar keywords. To use it, type the first few letters of your keyword and end it with an asterisk (*). This tells the search system to fill in the rest of the keyword. For example, if I type Amer* into the search system, I may get results like America, American, Americans, or I could get any number of words that begin with the letters A-M-E-R.
A wildcard search uses a question mark (?) in place of a letter to let the search system fill in the missing letter. For example, if I type wom?n, I could get results like women, woman, or womyn.
Searching with Multiple Keywords
Searching with a single keyword will likely return thousands of results. Realistically, there’s no way you can sift through all of that information. To be more precise in your search, you can combine keywords.
To combine keywords, use a logic connector called a Boolean operator. Use the words “AND,” “OR,” or “NOT” to combine or omit keywords in your search.
If you want the search system to look for multiple specific keywords at the same time, type “AND” between each keyword. This tells the search system to retrieve results that contain every keyword.
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If you want the search system to search for multiple alternative terms, type “OR” between each keyword. This will tell the search system to present results containing any of the keywords listed.
If you want to omit keywords, type “NOT” and follow it with the keywords you don’t want to see in the results. The search system will omit any results with the word, or words, following “NOT.” Because of this, it’s important to list these keywords last.
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You can use multiple Boolean operators at the same time by nesting your keywords in a single search. To do this, group similar keywords or concepts together within parentheses and follow it with the additional keywords you want to search for or avoid. For example, if I was researching shell shock in American soldiers during World War I, but kept getting results about British soldiers, I could search: (“Shell shock” OR PTSD OR neurasthenia) AND (“Great War” OR WWI OR “World War I”) AND America NOT Britain
Keywords are some of the most vital pieces of your searching process. As you experiment with different combinations of keywords, synonyms, and Boolean operators, you’ll become better at refining your searches and uncovering sources that are most relevant to your topic. Try the searching tips described above and see what you can discover on JSTOR.
