LibGuides: Mentorship & Research: How to Search for Sources

Keyword Searching

Keyword searching means breaking your research question down into basic terms.
Library resources are best at keyword matching rather than natural language searching, although many are transitioning to incorporating natural language.
For example:
- Your research question might be, "How does hand washing affect the hygiene of hospital staff or operating rooms?"
- Keywords would be: hand washing, hospital hygiene, hospital staff hygiene, etc.
- To search the MoLib collection, you might type: hand washing AND hospital hygiene
You may want to include Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) or quotation marks for a more precise search.
- Boolean operators tell the database to include or exclude specific terms (health OR hospital)
- Quotation marks mean search results will contain those terms in that order ("hand washing")

Browsing means investigating search results in a more casual or serendipitous way.
You might have opened a newspaper or magazine to see what headlines or images catch your attention--this is browsing.
You can do the same in an online context. Look in a journal or database that is relevant to your topic, and see what is featured or available. You might know this as scrolling.
Skim the abstract or introduction to determine relevance.

Lateral searching refers to looking beyond the source in front of you to understand more context or related information.
One example might be during a lecture in class, your instructor mentions an event or scholar of interest to you and you perform a quick Google search to learn more.
Maybe you read about a chemistry experiment and want to learn more about their methods, so you look outside of their research article for more information.
Lateral searching can also take place within library resources using hyperlinked data such as subjects, author names, journal titles, and more.
You could think of lateral searching as diving into the research rabbit hole.