 Let's talk about a vitally important little research concept called the word bank Research is just a word game. You get in a database, throw in some words, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't Let's take an example. My topic is the subculture of women who ride motorcycles So I get in the database for example Articles plus on the home page of the Ohio hiring university libraries and I put in what I would put in at Google For example, what is the culture of subculture of women who ride motorcycles? problem in a database though is it's looking for that phrase all those words strung together and Preferably in exactly that order and I don't get much. I have to go back and play the word game So let's take a few steps back We've got three main ideas motorcycles women and subculture. Let's start with motorcycles and see what happens Throw it in a database 482,395 hits that's a lot But actually the first thing I want to do is make it as big as I can so I'm going to put a asterisk after the L in motorcycle and I Get motorcycle motorcycles motorcycle list everything that could be stuck to Motorcycle and I get even more 536,000 to under 85 okay, I Need to narrow that down and start adding the other parts of my topic So I'm going to end the idea of women and indeed that makes a big difference now. I've got 16,971 and Some of these are looking pretty interesting for example on Dubai's roads women hop on Hardley's and shadow stereotypes and you see that the subheadings the Topic headings the subject headings say things like social aspects conduct of life beliefs opinions and attitudes I Want to keep track of all these terms that seem to be close to or related or synonyms for the ideas in my topic So I start a word bank which is a piece of paper a place to write down The words that I'm finding and group them by idea Let's go back to my search one more time and add the third idea Women and motorcycle and Social aspects. I'm all the way down to 85 hits and many of these are really useful Here's one that was really good women and outlaw motorcycle gangs. I like what I see and My word bank is growing All of these words have gone by in articles and books and videos that are listed in my results I want to take that basic idea use the words I've been finding and Expand it So I've added other ways to say each of my three ideas Such as women or female or girl any one of those forms of that idea will be okay for me I'm the same with the other two ideas and then because that's what I'm looking for I have limited it to scholarly or peer-reviewed journals and now I have a set of 276 things Many of which seem to be the kind of thing I'm looking for and our scholarly articles And my word bank just keeps growing so the next database I try to search I'll have even more ways to search in it and find stuff I can use Just keep trying the different combination of the words I find That's why it's a word game. If what I put in doesn't work. I just try a different combination Until I get what I need Usually if you haven't found what you need it's because you just haven't put the words in the right place at the right time And of course you can always ask us you don't have to struggle and get frustrated That's what librarians do all day Chat with us text us call us drop in we'd like to answer questions