COMP 2000 Advanced College Writing

Now we'll come up with an example research question and pick out the keywords to use when searching in an academic database.

Our research question will be: How will a TikTok ban negatively impact the civic engagement of young adults in the United States?

In most academic databases we can't type out the entire question, so we'll just pick out the important keywords. In this case we'll choose 'TikTok ban', 'civic engagement', 'young adults', and 'United States' as our keywords.

In the academic database we'll need to connect the keywords using Boolean Operators, which will be discussed shortly.

Now we'll brainstorm different broad and narrow search keywords for the example research question: How will a TikTok ban negatively impact the civic engagement of young adults in the United States?

General or Broad Keywords: Community, Public Concern

Synonyms or Related Keywords: Civic Participation

Narrow or Specific Keywords: Voting, Volunteering, Boycotting

Boolean Operators are used to connect keywords when searching in an academic database. The three common operators are the words 'AND', 'OR', and 'NOT'.

Most databases require these to be capitalized so they know they aren't keywords themselves.

AND - Helps narrow searches by finding results that contain all the keywords.
Example: civic engagement AND social media

OR - Helps broaden searches by finding results that contain either or both of the keywords.
Example: teen* OR young adult OR adolescent

NOT - Helps narrow searches by eliminating a keyword from the results.
Example: social media NOT Facebook

From our previous example research, where we extracted the keywords, we would want to connect them using the 'AND' Boolean Operator. Therefore, our database search query would be civic engagement AND (teen* OR young adult OR adolescent) AND (social media NOT Facebook)