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What are keywords?

Keywords (or key words) are words that tell you what approach you should take when answering an assignment question. 

Keywords can include content (topic), limiting (restricting), and task (instruction) words.

Assignment example:

"Your building project is a medium-rise building for which you need to provide independent oversight of the building work throughout the construction process. Upon completion of construction, you need to ensure that the building is safe for use, accessible and energy-efficient. Analyse and interpret the building project’s plans specifications and engineering drawings cross-checking the legislation requirements. Further, identify legislation non-compliance areas, and monitor the progress of the building work against the legislation compliance and quality assurance techniques and procedures.​"

When you are searching for information for an essay question, assignment or project, use the identified content and limiting keywords to search for information sources in our Library Search and online.

Keyword search strategies

Sample assignment topic: "You are required to assess medium rise building’s plans specifications and identify legislative non-compliance areas for the same. The project is conducted in Australia."

Once you have analysed your topic and done some preliminary reading, you are ready to break down the chosen research topic into key concepts selected from both the topic and your readings. It is best to identify 2 to 4 key concepts, with each concept containing up to 2 words, which will serve as keywords or search terms you'll type in Library Search to find relevant resources.  You might need to build separate search strategies for different aspects of your research as well as use a variety of keywords to ensure you cover all aspects of the topic.

For example, focusing on the assignment topic, listed are the main concepts or keywords: 'building', and the narrower concepts, such as 'legislation', 'medium rise building', 'building plans specifications', 'non-compliance', and Australia. Alternatively, you could use synonymous (related), or broader and narrower terms, such as:

building OR construction OR structure

law

legislation

legislative requirements

guidelines 

regulations

non-compliance

breach

medium-rise building

specifications or specs

Apply the following strategies to combine them:

• for a basic search, enter the identified keywords in the Library Search field, for example: building legislation Australia
• you can combine keywords with some other aspects of your research, for example, you can combine 'building legislation' and 'medium-rise' in your searches by using the Boolean operators (AND, OR & NOT) for narrowing or broadening your searches, or for excluding some search terms from your searches, if appropriate. The use of Boolean operators allows for constructing more complex search statements, for example:

  building AND (legislation OR "legislative requirement*" OR regulations OR guidelines) 

• think of possible synonyms and related words or phrases, for example, building OR construction OR structure
• search exact phrases by enclosing the phrase in quotes, for example, "legislative requirement"
• find a term with various endings by using as a truncation symbol represented by an asterisk (*), for example, build* will retrieve building, buildings, builder, and build
• group related or synonymous terms together by placing them in parentheses, for example, (law OR legislation OR regulations OR guidelines). Also consider the Australian English and American English spelling of words. 

Boolean operators

Boolean Operators are the words AND, OR, and NOT used in library databases that can make searches more precise, and save you time by removing the need to go through all the search results in order to find the most relevant articles. For example, when searching on the topic of 'urban design', you could apply the following terms and operators:

AND narrows the search resulting in more focused results, for instance, searching for  “urban design” AND "social aspects', all articles in your result will include both concepts (keywords)

OR broadens the search by instructing the database to search for any of the words, which is particularly useful for synonyms or related terms, i.e. “urban design” OR “city planning” OR “civic design”

NOT narrows the search by instructing the database to remove all unnecessary search results, for example “urban design” NOT “history”

Keyword searching strategies - Video

Search tools on the VU library website

Link through to the library website

Many (but not all) VU Library resources can be accessed through VU Library Search. Keywords or search terms can be entered in the search box.

The library also provides tools to allow users to search for the book, journal article, video, or newspaper whether in physical or electronic format. These tools are located below the main search box on the library website. Consider the text listed under each of the search tools. 

1. A-Z Databases - Find articles, ebooks, streaming videos, case studies and special collections.

2. Publication Finder - Find online publications by title - journals and ebooks.

3. BrowZine - Easy browsing of scholarly journals on any device.

VU Library Search Overview: Part 1

VU Library Search Overview: Part 2

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