Keyword searching is where you choose relevant synonyms for your search terms, and search for those words within different fields, such as the title or abstract. To come up with keywords think critically about your research question, and identify the primary concepts in your search. Then think about alternate ways of describing your keywords by coming up with a list of synonyms and related words. There are three primary steps to creating a keyword search strategy. They are:
1) Find the keywords in your research question
2) Create a chart with keyword synonyms and related terms
3) Add Boolean operators to create a search string
1) In the research question 'Does Music Therapy Reduce Stress in Premature Infants?' The keywords would be:
2) A chart of synonyms and keywords would look like this:
| Music Therapy | Stress | Premature Infants |
| music intervention | anxiety | preterm infants |
| premature or preterm baby |
3) Adding Boolean Operators (see below) creates the following search string - (music Therapy OR music intervention) AND (stress OR anxiety) AND (premature Infants OR preterm infants OR premature baby OR preterm baby).
Thankfully, CINAHL will help you create a search string like the one above. In CINAHL, you can select your operators from a dropdown menu, and CINAHL provides related terms with OR already added for you. This is how the above example would look in a CINAHL keyword search:
Databases cannot understand natural language, but database searches can be made very precise using Boolean operators. Boolean operators tell databases exactly how you want your search terms combined for the optimal results. Let's take a look-
AND tells the database that all terms must be present in every result the database brings back. AND narrows your search; the more terms you combine using AND, the fewer results your search will retrieve. For instance: Music Therapy AND Stress AND Premature Infant will only bring back articles that include all of those terms. [Music Therapy] AND [Stress] = Articles with both keywords
OR broadens your search. It tells the database to bring back results that have any of your search terms. The search Stress OR Anxiety would bring back articles that discuss both stress and anxiety. OR is best used for synonyms or related terms. For instance: music therapy AND (stress OR anxiety). Every article returned would discuss music therapy, and either stress or anxiety the related term sound. [Stress] OR [Anxiety] = articles with either keyword
NOT excludes results that contain a specific term. It's good practice to use NOT sparingly, and generally in response to a problem in your search.
For instance, if you're looking for research on neurodiversity AND brain development and keep finding animal studies done on mice instead of humans, you could search for (neurodiversity AND brain development) NOT mice. [neurodiversity] NOT [mice] = articles will have neurodiversity, but do not have mice.