Selecting Keywords/Creating a Concept Chart
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Your ability to identify concepts and select keywords will help you determine the words and phrases to use when you start searching for information to support your research question.
A concept is another word for an "idea" that represents one part of your research question.
The words and phrases that describe concepts, or act as synonyms for concepts, are also known as keywords or terms.
Let's take a look at the Holocaust research question again.
What are the effects of the Holocaust on survivors and subsequent generations?
Let's break down the question into concepts or its basic ideas:
 | 1. Effects of trauma 2. Holocaust 3. Survivors |
Often it is helps to think of other "terms" that mean the same as each concept. For example, what other words or phrases mean the same as concepts 1, 2, and 3 above?
| CONCEPT 1 | AND | CONCEPT 2 | AND | CONCEPT 3 | |
| effect* OR psychological effect | | Holocaust OR genocide | | survivor* | |
By breaking the search statement into concepts and looking for synonyms, the above table would determine the following search statement:
- (effect* OR psychological effect) AND (Holocaust OR genocide) AND (survivor*).
You do not have to re-invent the wheel here. You could use a general thesaurus or a specialized thesaurus like Contemporary Thesaurus of Social Science Terms and Synonyms, found in most libraries, which will help you find ideas and meaningful terms to use in your searches. Some thesauri are available online, such as the UNESCO Thesaurus. This resource is a controlled vocabulary developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation which includes subject terms in fields including education, science, culture, social and human sciences, information and communication, and politics, law and economics.
In the following readings you will find out about Truncation (*) and Boolean Logic, the use of AND, NOT, and OR, to combine terms for a more focused search.