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SPCH 1311 & 1321 | Intro to Speech Communication & Business and Professional Speech | Professor Cárdenas

A guide to help you do product research for your group persuasive project.

Searching with Keywords

The most important thing to know when you're searching the databases is that databases do not work like Google.

You can put a whole search phrase into Google like "articles about Texas businesses" and get over 700,000,000 results! That's because Google breaks up your search sentence into keywords, and searches for pages that contain some or all of those words, in no particular order.

The databases don't work like that! If you put that same search phrase into the databases, you get:



If you put a search phrase like that into the databases, you won't get any results, because unlike Google, the databases are searching for that exact phrase.

That doesn't mean there aren't articles about this topic in the database, it just means you won't find them by searching with that kind of search phrase.


So what's the solution? Think in keywords!

Pick out the most important keywords in your search phrase. In this case, the most important keywords are:

  • Texas
  • businesses
  • The word 'articles' is not helpful because we are already searching for articles in the databases (magazine, newspaper, and journal articles). So using the word in your search is redundant.

Once you have a short list of keywords, you'll want to brainstorm as many as possible. Think of synonyms for your keywords, related words or phrases, related concepts, or more specific versions.

For example, rather than just say businesses, you could use related words like industry or products or manufacturing. Or you could be more specific with Texas and use a particular geographic area of Texas; Houston  or hill country, for example.

Keep in mind that no one combination of keywords will bring you back everything on a topic. You may have to do several searches in the database using different combinations of keywords to make sure you're not missing some resources.

Scroll down for tips on combining keywords for an effective database search.

Boolean Searching

Ever heard of Boolean Searching, Boolean Operators or Boolean Logic? Don't worry if you haven't!

All "Boolean" refers to are specific ways of combining keywords using the words and, or, and not. It's a way to expand or limit the number of search results you get in the database.

The most useful Boolean operator is and. If you search the database using a keyword, and you get too many results, adding another keyword and connecting it to the first one with and is a great way to narrow down your results.

That's because you're placing more conditions on the search. You're saying, "I only want articles that have all of the following terms: 'Texas' and 'business.'" And so the pool of articles that fits those conditions is much smaller than if you had just searched using one of those keywords.

We can understand this concept using a Venn diagram:


The blue circle represents all the sources that contain the phrase "Texas." The yellow circle represents all the sources that contain the word "business." The middle of the Venn diagram, where both circles overlaps, represents all those articles that contain both the words "Texas" and the word "business."

You can see that that area is smaller than either of the two circles, so you have a smaller pool of articles to have to sort through. If you do this search in the database, here's what it looks like:



But 65,784 results is TOO MANY! We need to narrow this down even more to get to a reasonable amount of articles to sort through.


The pool is narrowed even more dramatically when you add another keyword, connected with and:




You can see this in the databases, too, when three words connected with and narrows the pool of articles that contain all three terms:

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