This video will show you how important it is to
try a variety of search terms (aka keywords)
when doing research. My topic is whether hydraulic fracturing leads to
the contamination of local water supplies. For my first set of keywords, I have chosen
“hydraulic fracturing” contamination water.
If we scroll down look at some of the results for
this search, we will see that often my exact search terms appear in either the title or
description of each source. These look like
good results. But hydraulic fracturing is also sometimes called
fracking. Watch what happens when I replace “hydraulic
fracturing” with fracking in the search box.
The top six results still look good, but they are
completely different sources from my first
search. Now you fracking appearing in all the titles.
And what if I change contamination to pollution?
It once again changes to a new set of different
results. Remember that there is often much more out
there on a given topic than your first search will
show. Play around with your keywords to find
additional sources on your topic, especially if
your first search didn’t bring back great results.