 When you're doing research for a project or paper, you'll probably start off with a research topic, but if you try to put that research topic into a database as it is, you probably won't get any results. In this video you'll learn how to differentiate between a research topic and keywords, how to transform a research topic into keywords, and how to develop keywords through preliminary searching. So what's the difference between a research topic and keywords? Think of it this way. A research topic is simply what you're researching. If someone asked you what you were doing your project on, you could probably say a phrase or a sentence describing what you're trying to learn more about. In contrast, keywords represent the major concepts from that research topic. Think of it as a way of simplifying your research topic to something that a database could understand. For this reason, your keywords would just be a list of words and possibly phrases, not anything that could really stand alone as a sentence. To get from a research topic to keywords, start by identifying the major concepts of your research topic. There's no magic number of concepts, just look for the major ideas. You'll notice that in this example, I ended up with three major concepts. Once I have my concepts, I want to think about alternate terminology for each concept, since not every author uses the same words that I do to describe my topic. To find these keywords, I can brainstorm on my own, or I can do a little preliminary searching to find out what terminology is being used by others in the field. I can do some basic research on my topic, find out more about it, and figure out what terminology scholars and others are using to describe my concepts. Once I find other keywords, I can add them to the terms I started with. I'll just keep everything grouped by concept. Now we have to get the keywords into the database. To learn how to create an effective search statement, check out our video from keywords to database. There are plenty of ways to get help with the library. For additional help with figuring out how to turn a research topic into keywords, ask a librarian.