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ENGL 102 - C02: Rhetoric and Composition (Dr. Garriott)

Search Tips & Strategies: Keywords

Search Tips & Strategies: Keywords

Library resources like Find It @ USC and article databases search differently from Google or other internet search engines.  One of the biggest differences is that they search best by using keywords that describe the most important concepts in your research question. 

What are the most important concepts in your research question?  What terms can you use to describe the concepts?  You can start specific but you may find, especially when trying to locate scholarly sources, that you have to broaden your search. 

 

hip-hop fashion  
  clothing  
     

 

Search Tips & Strategies: Constructing Your Search

Search Tips & Strategies: Constructing Your Keyword Search

AND AND narrows your search by telling Find It @ USC, article databases, or other library resources that ALL keywords must be found in a source in order for it appear in your results
OR

OR broadens your search by telling Find It @ USC, article databases, or other library resources that ANY keywords much be found in a source in order for it to appear in your results. 

This is a great option for searching synonyms or related terms.  If you type in women OR females, results will have either term but not necessarily both.

*

This is a truncation symbol that will broaden your search by including various word endings.

influen*  will search for influence, influences, influential, influencer, as well as influencers 

    

   

Here is an example of how to construct a search:

 
https://guides.library.sc.edu/c.php?g=1214199&p=8882352
guides.library.sc.edu
CC-MAIN-2023-14
27102
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GBQVXX3BXJRH523JOCMZQXO6WTWXNOER
<urn:uuid:238b45f0-7214-427e-bedd-82507ebe714a>
2023-04-01T03:37:50Z
3.86.37.148
text/html
sha1:ISYX42ZH2GTOXK2JTFL5KL3CGHLXIS5Q
<urn:uuid:253545cc-6766-4b2b-a71b-31e687944ba0>
https://guides.library.sc.edu/c.php?g=1214199&p=8882352
response
<urn:uuid:7bb03c6b-cd44-4dea-92ea-5ef7ce6e3764>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-14
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for March/April 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-126
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/