Master of Counselling
Defining & Refining Search Terms

Search Term Basics

This is perhaps the most important step in your process of finding relevant and useful information. What you do here will influence the quality of results you obtain from using search tools such as library catalogues, journal indexes, databases of research literature, and Web resources.

Defining your terms, and broadening, narrowing and refining your search is an iterative process. It is always a good exercise to brainstorm and write down synonyms representing the topic of your information search. The terms you use to describe your topic may not coincide with the terms assigned by the indexers who analyzed the content of your search tools, or with the words used by authors although their works may address ideas and concepts similar to those you have set out to research.

For example, let's say your research topic is "career counselling". If you opt to skip the brainstorming step and do a basic keyword search for "career counseling" in the University of Lethbridge Library catalogue, you will retrieve more than 55 titles.

If you search for "career counseling," however, as a subject heading search, you are told that the catalogue uses the subject heading "Vocational guidance" instead. Clicking the link to the subject heading Vocational guidance produces a list of subject headings linked to almost 300 titles about vocational or career counseling, representing a list of sources far greater than your original basic keyword search using the same search terms.

Here are some questions to guide your process of brainstorming and recording synonyms and concepts related to your search topic.

  • What are the central concepts comprising the search topic?
  • For each central concept
    • are there variant spellings (e.g., counselling, counseling)?
    • are there variant ways to express it (e.g., career, profession, vocation, job, employment)?
    • are there related or more specific concepts and ideas you are interested in (e.g., counselling for gifted high school students, training and supervision of high school counsellors)?
    • are there concepts unrelated to your search topic that are spelled the same way as those included in your search topic statement? (e.g., the word "count" could refer to reciting numbers in order; finding the total number of items; being significant; a European nobleman)

Let's use the sample search topic "career counselling" to brainstorm some additional terms that could be useful (keeping in mind that variant spellings and terminology may also be involved):

Broader terms: careers
professions
vocations
schools
counselling
Related terms: school counsellors
school psychologists
educational counseling
guidance counseling
Narrower terms: high school counselling
elementary school counseling
vocational interests
vocational qualifications

Refinement of your search is guided by what you find. Tips on how to broaden and narrow your search are covered in the section on Basic Searching in this tutorial. If you do not find much that is relevant, you may be using terms that do not happen to coincide with those used in your finding tools.

Starting with your own words for describing your search topic will sometimes retrieve at least a few items that look somewhat useful. If this is the case, the important next steps are to:

  1. read the record describing those items carefully
  2. note other appropriate subject headings (library catalogues), descriptors/subject terms (journal indexes), or other relevant keywords (all search tools), and then
  3. search again using those subject headings, descriptors, or keywords.

Sometimes the terminology used in the profession will differ over time and across different databases. Explore and experiment with different terms.

Practice Exercise

Image of a book Choose a subject of your choice and using the ERIC Thesaurus write down the list of the broader, narrower and related terms as outlined there. This will not only give you practice in the ERIC Thesaurus, but it will give you help in understanding the importance of using appropriate controlled vocabulary (more about this in the next step) in the research process.

When you have completed this, go to the University of Lethbridge Library catalogue and use one or two of the ERIC thesaurus terms you wrote down to search the Subject Heading index. Do your searches retrieve any results? Are the ERIC Thesaurus descriptors for your search topic the same as those used in the U of L Library catalogue?

Discussion Questions

  1. In what ways can a tool like the ERIC Thesaurus assist you in choosing appropriate terms for your search?
  2. Why are synonyms so important?
  3. How can library catalogues help steer you towards subject headings that represent aspects of your topic?

Additional Sources of Guidance

Maintained by Rumi Graham

Back to top