 Once you've identified a research topic and a database to search, it's time to start thinking about the keywords you will use to find relevant sources on your topic. When running a keyword search, the database will return results that have the keywords you've entered in certain fields, such as the title and abstract or table of contents. We talk more about field searching in another video, but it's important to keep in mind that the database won't return a result unless it finds the keywords you've identified in the item record, so we need to be careful in selecting effective keywords. Often this means using the same terms that the authors of relevant sources have used. An important first step in choosing good keywords is identifying the core concepts in your research topic or question. Let's say we had the following research question. How effective are social media advertising campaigns in addressing vaccine hesitancy? Were we to type this whole question into a database search? We may find that we retrieve few, if any results, because there are many words in the question that authors of relevant studies may not have used. Words like how effective and addressing are not core to our topic and should be left out of a keyword search. Social media advertising campaigns and vaccine hesitancy on the other hand are core concepts in our research topic and should be part of our search. Sources that include these terms or terms similar to these will very likely be useful to us. When beginning a search always look carefully at your research topic and pull out the core concepts to use as keywords. After you've shortlisted your core concepts, consider synonymous and like terms that authors may be using in place of the terms you've identified. A paper entitled combating vaccine refusal through Facebook ads a preliminary study would definitely be of interest to us but you can see that different words are used such that this article might not be returned in a database search if we only use the core concepts we first identified as keywords. It is often helpful to create a table with each core concept having its own column. Under each core concept list other terms that authors might have used to refer to those concepts. By incorporating synonymous and like terms into your search strategy your search will be more sensitive returning more potentially relevant results. A successful search sometimes requires flexibility. You may need to try different combinations of keywords to find what you're looking for. You may need to try a different database. As you run searches have a look at your results as the terms researchers have used in titles and abstracts may be useful keywords to use in your search that you hadn't thought of before. You might find that some keywords you listed are not very helpful because they have the database returned to many irrelevant results. Words that have many different meanings are often problematic in this way. Also as you run searches and gather sources you might decide that you need to narrow, run or otherwise tweak your research topic. In another video covering Boolean operators we will look at how to enter search terms into a database to run effective searches.