Before you start searching for books, articles or web pages, you need to choose keywords that represent your research topic.
Keywords are significant words (usually nouns or noun phrases) which can be used as search terms in online catalogs or databases. They can appear in the title, subject headings, abstract, or text of records. A keyword search typically searches all or most of these fields.
Keyword Searching
Enter the basic ideas/keywords of your topic in the search box. The computer searches for books with those keywords in the title, subjects, and descriptions of the books.
Subject Searching
Subject searching is more "powerful" than keyword searching - it uses a specific vocabulary to find books in the catalog. To find a good subject, look at the display page of a book you already like. Click on that subject link to run a search.
Related Terms
Think about related terms such as: imperialism with Spanish-American War research.