 and you should get a notification. This is searching 101. My name is Carissa Powell and I use she, her pronouns and I work with the first year composition classes. So if you are in English, 101, et cetera, I am your librarian and you can email me about anything related to those classes at Carissa at utk.edu. And my name is Makayla Wood and I am the graduate teaching assistant in the teaching and learning programs department. So starting off today, we're going to do a Slido poll and we're just really interested in learning what you're hoping to get out of this workshop. So you can either access this poll by scanning the QR code on the screen with your phone or you can go to Slido.com and enter that code. And as you guys answer, the words that you or whatever you respond will come up on the screen. So we can all view that. So I see somebody put best search terms and or not searching tips. I like it. Awesome. Thank you so much for responding. These are great answers. And I think we're going to go for some of those and some other stuff. So we're excited to talk to you guys today. All right. So we're going to be going over how to figure out the best keywords based on your research question, how to brainstorm for synonyms based on those keywords, and then a fancy library jargon, which is some search strategies using Boolean operators. So we're going to kick it off by starting to talk about some keywords. These are basically words that represent the main concepts in a research topic. So searching in library databases is a slightly different than searching in Google. And that in Google, you could potentially put your entire research question and hit search and still get back some results in library databases. We really recommend kind of pairing down the most important words so that you get better search results. So the most important thing for this is taking some time to think about what your topic is and what the main ideas are from that topic. So I really recommend taking out a piece of paper, opening up a Google doc and just doing a little bit of brainstorming. Maybe that's writing out your research question and underlining the most the words that really stand out to you. And this doesn't have to take a lot of time. Usually this takes one to two minutes, but I find it to be really helpful to kind of center yourself before you jump into a database or a catalog to start. The other word we want to define is synonyms. And these are basically words that mean very similar meaning to another word. So it really helps in a library database because sometimes the word you're using is not the word that's being used by other authors to write about this topic. And so it can really help expand your search results to get more options. And we have time later on in this workshop to practice coming up with keywords and synonyms. So this is just a little preference before we get into that. Something that I wanted to show for folks who might have trouble thinking about synonyms, because I do as well, a few places I really like to start is credo reference, which I will show in a second. But sometimes I will just Google the word and synonym and see what pops up. And I have found this to be really helpful sometimes because if you're so deep into your research question, sometimes it's hard to think of a different way to say something. And so I strongly recommend just going to a thesaurus, typing in your word and just seeing what else is out there. You are also always welcome to reach out to a librarian for help. This is something we all really love working with students about. And so we'll show at the end how to get help. So I am going to demo credo reference, which is a tool everyone has access to through the University of Tennessee libraries. If you get to this from the library's homepage in your off campus, it will ask you to log in with your net ID and password. But this is something you have access to 24 seven wherever you are in the world. So does anybody have a topic they're currently doing and want to pop that into chat? And I will do a little demo search on your topic. Oh, we have one child policy. Thank you so much. All right, we're going to do one child policy. Credo reference is kind of like a very academic Wikipedia and that it's a reference source. So it's not a secondary source, but it is a really good place to start in brainstorm. So you can pop your search terms in right there, but you could also come down here. Like maybe you don't even have a topic yet. This is a great place to come and be like, oh, I'm really interested in like the coral reefs or grasslands and national parks. And you can kind of brainstorm from there. But because we have a topic, we're going to hit enter. And this is what your search results are going to look like. I'm going to zoom in just a tiny bit. So it gives you this is from the Encyclopedia of Environment and Society. So this kind of gives you a definition. So if you do have to cite a definition in your paper, this is a really great place to come to. And these are some key concepts. So when we're talking about keywords and synonyms, another place to search is maybe one child policy, only child, birth order. The other aspect of this tool I really, really love is this graph word cloud over here, brainstorming cloud. And so basically you have one child policy in the center here, but it lists other areas that are researched about and so maybe we could go over to zero population growth. You could click on that and the graph will change again. And it will then bring up a definition of zero population growth. So and it will also save all of your search at the bottom here. So you can always get back to one child policy, but this is just a tool I find to be incredibly helpful in the brainstorming phase, which will lead to really more productive searching. So this search tip is basically do a lot of brainstorming before you even get into your searching. All right. And thank you again for the person who volunteered their topic. That was, I hope we find some great stuff for you today. Awesome. So moving on to some Boolean operators. So Boolean operators are conjunctions that can be used in between search terms to help either expand your search or narrow your search. And they're important because they help make the search more, the search process more efficient for you, the searcher. And they allow the searcher to customize the search in a way that gives you the type of results that they are looking for. Like databases can be really intimidating because there's so many different articles and resources, but using Boolean operators can help searchers find more relevant information. And I think it's particularly useful whenever you're wanting to expand or narrow your results. So for example, at the beginning of your search, when you may wanna get as many results as possible, you would use the or Boolean operator because that would give you this or that. So you would have more search results. And then on the other hand, if you were nearing the end of your search process and you wanted very specific results, you could use and or not Boolean operator because that would limit the results. And then on the next slide, that's kind of visualized. And it has like the Venn diagrams. And I'm a really visual person, like I learn better whenever I can see things. So sometimes whenever I'm doing research, I will literally draw Venn diagrams and shade in things to help me figure out what Boolean operator I need to use. So for example, if you're looking for peanut butter and jelly, it would be that middle portion that shaded in that would be the results that you would get. And peanut butter or jelly would be everything. So like I said, that would expand your search results. And then peanut butter, but not sandwich, you would just get peanut butter as your search result. And then here is an example of like search strings that you could use. So peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and jelly and sandwich. So in that case, you would only have results that have peanut butter, jelly and sandwich in it. And then peanut butter or jelly. So now that we have talked a lot about the whys of some of these things, we want to let everyone get a chance to practice. And so we have a padlet available for folks to brainstorm in. So the link is in chat. Take a minute or two to write down what your research question is. And this can be very drafty. This is not your final research questions, but what you have so far. And then in the other column, write down a few of the keywords you think would go with that. Awesome. So we have a research question. Should college athletes be paid? And then it looks like the keywords they came up with were college athletes and paid. We've also got how are handicrafts culturally important. And then we've got for that crafting and culture. That's awesome. For these, Michaela, what would you think of as synonyms for some of these keywords? You could do maybe for college athletes and paid. You could do something like reimbursement or I know like NIL deals are a student, yeah, student. And then crafts, you could maybe do hobbies, perhaps. Very nice. So this is just a short example of that brainstorming activity. Something I also like to do for this is to exchange this with a friend and have them come up with some keywords and synonyms with me. So we've got down here also craftsmanship. And so if you're really in that stuck place of not being sure what to enter, what search terms to use, this is a great place to kind of start. I also realize that we could come over here because I wasn't I wasn't thinking of a really great thing for like like handicrafts, so we could also come back over here and see if there's anything in here that would be so we've got also. Yeah, also some examples of. Types of crafting to like knitting activism. I'm very intrigued by all of your topics. Like this is one of my favorite parts of teaching is just hearing different topics that are happening. Yeah, this sounds super interesting. Thank you, everybody for sharing. That is the very structured part of our workshop. We would love to have everyone fill out this survey. So in chat, there's a very short survey to go to. This is also how you would get your proof of attendance. If you're watching this on YouTube, the link to the survey will be in the description box. So everyone take about a minute or two to fill out the survey and then we would also love to see you next week on Thursday, February 10th at 1pm. We're going to be going over secondary sources. And so we'll be drawing on all of the kind of skills we talked about today and putting that into how to find those secondary sources.