Language Matters
The language used to describe experiences, systems, and conditions have evolved over time in the field of social work. While conducting your research, think of synonyms and variations of words or terms you may be using. Some tools that may be useful to you are:
BU Library Search
You can use the BU Libraries Search box to look for print and electronic resources available through the Boston University Libraries. These resources include print books and journals available in the library stacks, as well as e-books and full-text journal articles.
Want support getting started with your search? Check out our searching the library tutorial page.
The Research Cycle
The research cycle guides our search process. We go from a big idea, to a smaller idea, to a research question. From there, we identify the key terms of our search topic and find sources.
For our research cycle, our path travels in this order:
choosing a topic > exploring a topic > narrowing to a research question > finding sources > evaluating sources > selecting relevant sources > and repeating as needed!
Planning Our Search Through Mind Mapping
We want to take some time before we start searching to think about the content and type of result we want. What topics, thinkers, or ideas are relevant to our search? What do we want our results to look like? Do we want articles only from academic journals? Or only resources published in the last 5 years? This reflective information will guide us. This mapping of search strategy is helpful before we start searching, and as we refine our search.
Mind Mapping:
What is a Keyword
A keyword is a specific word or phrase which tells us what the information is about. An example of keyword might be "therapy." Search engines, like BU Libraries Search, or external search engines like Google, use keywords to find information most relevant to your search and rank your results.
Before we start searching, we want to think about the keywords we will use to find our results.
Creating and Using Keywords
For online searching, we use keywords to find results most relevant to our research question or topic.
Instead of typing our whole question into the search box, we want to identify keywords to focus our search results:
For example, if our research question is "How does incarceration impact mental health?" we would want to identify keywords and subjects to use when searching. To ensure we get strong results in our search, we want to focus on the most important words relevant to our research. In this example, we might first try in searching the keywords: "incarceration" and "mental health" to find results relevant to our research.
Some tips and tricks are:
- Try a synonym: Language, terms, and meaning can shift in contexts. A useful available social work keyword terms and synonyms page is available to you.
- Look at an article that's really useful to you. Notice the words and phrases the author(s) use throughout the text, and try searching for those keywords.
- Make your topic more broad or more narrow. If you're not getting enough results, try broadening your topic. If you're getting too many results that aren't specific enough, try search words with a narrower focus.
Creating Keywords:
