Besides brainstorming, another method you can use to develop a list of keywords is to do some initial searching, and then use the results of that search to expand and refine your list of keywords. Any database will provide you with ideas for new terms and topics related to your initial idea. To find additional keywords, simply browse your results and think about how those results are relevant or not relevant to your research question. For example, if you were investigating the impact of school nutrition programs on quality of life, an initial search using "nutrition" and "healthcare" might produce nearly 1 million results. Asking questions of the initial results as shown below will help you figure out how to improve those results:
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After questioning the initial results list, you might think of ways in which you can adjust your keywords. In this case, we want to use new keywords to focus on how school nutrition programs impact the quality of life of elementary school students:
The search above reduced our results list from more than 800,000 results to 77,714. This is still probably too many. One factor that we did not consider in the keyword search is geographic location. You can narrow that using the Geography limiter on the left side of the results screen:
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In this case, limiting the geographic area of interest to the United States reduced the results list to about 3000 sources, and further limiting to California reduced the results list to 26 sources. If you reduce the list too far, you can remove the limiters, or change your keywords to adjust.
For more information about how to use more limiters like the Geographic limiter in databases, see the Advanced Search guide.
