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CPELI Level 4

This guide is in support of CPELI Level 4, taught by Jim Hays, Jonathan Lucero and others, for researching argumentation essay topics.

Keywords

  • 1. Use two or three keywords rather than a complete sentence. Example:

     

                TOPIC: I'm interested in finding articles on the debate about childhood immunizations and the links to autism.

     

                KEYWORDS: immunizations -- autism -- debate

     

     2. Use "and" to connect your keywords and narrow your results. Example:

     

                immunizations AND autism AND debate

     

    3. Use "or" to connect keywords that are synonyms or related terms. This will increase your results. Example:

     

                teens OR youths OR adolescents

     

    4. Use quotation marks when you want to search for a phrase. Example:

     

                "childhood immunizations"

     

     5. Do you have too few or poor results? Use synonyms and related terms to find different results. Example:

     

                "vaccinations" in place of "immunizations"

     

                "controversy" in place of "debate"

     

    6. Use truncation, also known as stemming, to search multiple forms of words. Type an asterisk (*) at the end of a word, which allows you to search for a root form of a word and pick up any ending. Example:

     

                If you type teen* you will retrieve teen, teens, teenage, teenager, teenagers.

     

     

     

    The above keyword strategies are based in part from "Keyword Searching" by McConnell Library at Radford University.