To find articles/document on a topic, enter keywords (search terms) into Web of Science's search boxes. Web of Science then searches for documents that include your keywords in their titles, abstracts (summaries) and other key fields. The following steps will help you carefully identify and organise your keywords so that you're more likely to find the best results:
- Identify the words/keywords in your assignment/research question that are most relevant to your topic (i.e. words that distinguish the title from any other title). For an example, let's consider this question: “Evaluate various options for preventing injuries in the sport of high jumping".
Using our example, you might select the following keywords from this title: preventing, injuries and high jump. It's generally best to exclude generic terms such as "evaluate".
- Treat each word that you select from your title as a "separate" concept within the overall topic. Then, for each concept, identify any alternative words that have the same/similar meaning (or have opposite meanings e.g. inequality, equality). Different authors use different words to describe the same concept and if your keywords don't reflect this, you may miss important articles. Here's a list of keywords, organised by concept, based on our search example:
Concept 1 |
prevention |
avoidance |
|
others? |
Concept 2 |
injuries |
fracture |
dislocation
|
others? |
Concept 3 |
high jump |
|
|
others? |