Defining keywords

Main Contents Page

Before you start

STEP 1: STARTING out

- Recognise your need

- Think about your need

- Read about your topic

- Defining keywords

Draw mind map

Broader & narrower terms

Other spellings

Examples per faculty:

Agriculture / Sciences

Mind map

Management / Commerce

Mind map

Humanities / Social Sciences

Mind map

Education

Mind map

- Cost of information

- Summary

- Quiz

STEP 2: FINDING

STEP 3: EVALUATE

STEP 4: Legal and ethical USE

STEP 5: COMMUNICATE

Broader and narrower terms

Is there a broader or narrower subject that might include your topic, question or problem? Remember our topic is "Aids in the workplace."

  A broader subject might cover things like:   A narrower subject might be:  
 
  • immunological deficiency syndromes
  • Virus-induced immunosuppression
  • HIV infections
  • infectious diseases
 
  • AIDS
  • work safety
  • cost of AIDS in the workplace
  • prevalence of AIDS in the workplace
 

You must identify as many as possible such broader and narrower terms. They will help you when you do your search. Using different words will retrieve different information, therefore use all possible options when you search for information.

After searches were done on the Library on-line catalogue on some of the words identified above, the following was found:


It is clear that you get different results (varying number of "hits") from different words used in the searches. That is why it is so important to identify and follow up every possible word related to your topic.

Remember to keep any printouts of your searches, make notes of the resources found and keep information for your bibliographic records already at this early stage. See reading and making notes in step 5 to help you with this.

Definition:
Library online catalogue
The Library on-line catalogue is a database of titles of all the books, journals and audio- visual resources available in the Library.