Choosing Your Keywords

When researching a topic related to sustainability and the environment, you have many keyword options. Some keywords can be searched for on their own, such as:

sustainability

environmentalism

recycling

However, many important keywords for this topic will be phrases rather than a single word, such as climate change. You can try searching for both keywords, but if you're seeing a lot of irrelevant results, try enclosing the phrase in quotation marks. This will ensure that the database searches for that exact phrase instead of each word separately. For example:

"global warming"

"renewable energy"

"plastic pollution"

"climate equity"

Getting too many results?

Try adding more keywords to narrow your search. For example:

sustainability AND water AND california

You can also narrow your search further by removing keywords that you don't want included using NOT. For example:

environment AND wildlife NOT birds

Not getting enough results?

You can also broaden your search by grouping similar words together using OR. This will help you find resources that talk about the same topic using different language. For example:

"climate change" OR "global warming"

You can also combine AND and OR operators by putting parentheses around the OR group of keywords. For example:

water AND (pollution OR contamination)