 When searching for sources in library databases, you might be tempted to enter your entire research topic or question like you would in Google. Unfortunately, this often leads to zero results in library databases. Instead, you want to break down your topic or question into key words. Key words are the main points or concepts in your research topic that can be used to effectively search in library databases. To identify key words for your topic, ask yourself what are the main points or ideas. For example, in our topic, what effect does technology use having a child's development? Our key words would be technology use and child development. Before we begin searching, we need to brainstorm alternate and related key words for this topic. And we need to keep an eye out for even better key words as we search. Different people use different words to describe the same thing, so it helps to brainstorm synonyms for our topic and to keep an open mind as we search. Alternate key words for child development could be juvenile development, toddler development, or even adolescent development. This may depend on what age range you are interested in as you start to search. In this way, key words can also be used to narrow your search. Let's say we get thousands of search results on this topic, which is way too many. We can narrow it down by focusing on a related term, an age range, or even a specific type of technology, such as iPads or televisions. Notice that we do not choose effect as a key word, because this is too broad. In fact, nearly all the articles in our library databases might include the word effect. Instead, we want to brainstorm specific effects we might be interested in learning about, such as brain development, attention, creativity, or eyesight. Once we have brainstormed possible key words, we can begin searching. But as we search, we may discover new key words and might need to revise key words based on our results. Let's say we found one or two articles we are interested in. We might scour the article's abstracts and subjects to harvest some new key words. Also, we should note that if you have a very specific subject, such as parking at USU, you may not be able to find results on parking at Utah State University, even though these seem like great key words. However, if you broaden your search to university and parking, you may have more luck in library databases.