One good way to find relevant articles is to do a keyword search first. Remember all those words you brainstormed when you first started to think about searching for information on your topic? Keyword searching allows you to look for those words anywhere in the database record. If you do find one good article, you can then search using its Subject Headings.

Use keyword searching to:

• start your research
• identify the subject headings used for your topic
• find specific information (a fact, date or name)
• find every occurrence of the words you enter in that database

Searching using a single keyword may be easy; but most of your topics are probably more complex than a single word can describe. The following pages will give you some tips for combining more than one idea effectively.