How do I create keywords for searching?
Answer
The first thing you should do is to review your assignment, consider your topic, and then ask yourself ‘What do I want to know?’ Form research questions that you want to answer with your research. If you are tasked with writing a paper on leadership and you choose to discuss effective leadership styles, you might ask many of the following questions:
What leadership styles are effective?
What are the positive effects of strong leadership?
Which leadership style has the most impact on those positive effects?
Which leadership style is most prominent in my field of interest?
Each of those questions may require a separate search for resources/information! Pick one and just get started. Look at the question and identify the main topics. For our first example that is ‘leadership styles’ and ‘employee effectiveness’. I want to ask about leadership styles and I want to ask about how to make employees effective.
Break those subjects into simple search keywords that you can put into a search. For example: leadership, style, employee, effectiveness.
You also want to consider things like plural vs singular terms and synonyms (words that have the same meaning). If I type employees, it will only find entries that mention the plural form of employees. Searching for the singular ‘employee’, however, will find entries that mention either employee or employees. The same could be said of ‘effectiveness’. I might want to just use ‘effect’ as it will also find entries mentioned effectiveness.
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TLDR: You need to pick a broad topic that you're interested in - such as leadership. Now try to identify more specific topics within that topic. Look at the nouns related to it that you might ask about. Business leadership. Educator leadership. Student leadership. Are there even more specific things you could search for? Example: Marketing leadership.