 This video describes how to use the UTM Library Keyword Worksheet, available on the UTM Library Reference Help page. Before using a database or the library catalog to find articles and other resources, you first need to identify keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that describe your research topic or question. On the Keyword Worksheet, you'll see that the first step asks you to write down your research topic or question. Here is an example of a searchable question. What effect does socioeconomic status have on the summer slide? Once you've written down your research topic or question, you'll want to circle your keywords. It is very important to note that not every word in your research topic or question is a keyword. In our example, what effect does have on and the are not good keywords because they don't describe our topic. Socio-economic status and summer slide, however, are good keywords because they are the two main concepts that make up our question. Now that we've identified our keywords, we'll move on to step two of the worksheet which asks us to list our keywords and brainstorm synonyms or related terms. It is important to add synonyms and related terms to your search because databases and the library catalog will not automatically include them in your search. The second step in the worksheet asks you to list your keywords on the left-hand side of the table. On the right-hand side is where we include our synonyms and related terms. In our example, our synonyms are SES for socioeconomic status, and summer setback, summer learning loss, and summer learning gap for summer slide. When brainstorming synonyms and related terms, try to think of other words that could be used to describe your topic. Once you've brainstormed all of your synonyms and related terms, you'll be able to move on to step three of the worksheet, which asks you to create a search string using Boolean operators and other special characters. Don't worry if you've never heard of a Boolean operator. We explain it later in the video. Creating a search string with your keywords is the most efficient way of searching a database or the library catalog because it gives you more control over your search results. To begin, we're going to enter our first keyword, socioeconomic status, in the top row. Our second keyword, summer slide, will be listed in the second row. Once you've entered your keywords, complete the table by entering your synonyms and related terms. In our example, you'll see that our synonym SES is listed next to socioeconomic status, while summer setback and summer learning loss are entered in the same row as summer slide. It is very important that we enter our synonyms in the same row as our keywords because we're using the Boolean operators and or. We use or when we want to include synonyms or related terms in our search, such as SES for socioeconomic status and summer setback and summer learning loss for summer slide. We use and to connect to or more concepts, including their synonyms. For more information on Boolean operators, check out our help guides on the UTM library reference help page. The final stage of creating a search string is adding special characters to your search. The first one you'll want to consider is quotation marks. Quotation marks are used to search for phrases or concepts that are more than one word. For example, socioeconomic status, summer slide, summer setback, and summer learning loss. When we use quotation marks, we are telling the database that the words within the quotation marks must appear as an exact phrase in our search results. The second set of special characters that we want to consider using are those that help us truncate our search terms. Truncation is a search method that uses symbols in the place of letters to help you broaden your search. Although the symbols that we use to truncate can differ depending on the database, one of the most common symbols that databases use is the asterisk. When we truncate a word, we turn our search term into a root word by removing letters at the end of the term and replacing it with our truncation symbol. Let's use the word race as an example. To truncate race, we remove the E at the end of the word and replace it with the asterisk. By truncating race, we are telling the database to add multiple endings to R-A-C. This helps us retrieve search results with the words race, races, racial, etc. If you need any help, feel free to email us at ASKUTML.UTM at uterano.ca Use the online chat from the UTM Library homepage or reach out to us over Zoom and we can help.