In general when deciding on your keywords, consider the terminology commonly used in that field of study. As you are gathering your sources, pay attention, are they using additional words you hadn't considered? If so, make note of them!
Another tip for keeping your search organized: Put your Main Idea Keywords first and your Focusing Keywords second. In this class if you are researching a person for example, "Tim Burton," will be your Main Idea Keyword, and your Focusing Keyword may be AND director.
Boolean Operators are an important tool in a database. They tell the database the relationship you want between the keywords you are using.
AND: narrows a search by focusing it. EX: Tim Burton AND Director - this search requires the database to return articles that mention both.
OR: broadens a search by giving options. EX: films OR movies - this search can return results about either term, which in this example would be a huge range!
NOT: eliminates a term from the search. EX: my favorite instance was a student researching stingrays, the fish, and kept getting ice hockey results! To stop this you would put: stingrays NOT hockey. NOT isn't used as much as the other two, but it can come in handy!
You can use AND, OR, and NOT (in all capital letters) alone or in combination. When combining them, it helps to use parentheses to combine like terms and keep everything straight:
(films OR movies) AND Tim Burton
See the video below for more details on how to use Booleans.
You can get pretty far in a database search using just AND, OR, and NOT, but if you want to take your search to the next level, Boolean Modifiers are a great help.
( ) - Groups like terms together
* - wildcard that accounts for variations in prefixes, suffixes, and spelling
" " - phrase search, aka, the opposite of a wildcard, ensures the database will only pull up exactly the terms inside the quotes.
See the video below for more details.