 How do you use your assignment question to find academic articles? Use keywords. Keywords tell your search tool what information you need to find. If you type your whole question into a search tool, you can receive some pretty poor results. You will need to break down your question into its most basic parts by choosing keywords. Academic articles can use many different words to describe one topic. Think of all the different words to broaden your search. You can also include related words that are linked to your keywords to expand your search results. Use double quotation marks to group keywords that should go together to search for a phrase. For example, video games rather than video and games. Try out your keywords in a search tool like library search. Start with a few words and then add more words to narrow your search. Sometimes you may need to mix and match your keywords to find all the sources you need. If you need help picking out your keywords, ask us at the library.