Thinking keywords

Coming up with keywords that will cut down your searching is the second toughest part of writing a research paper, after coming up with a broad topic. Let's say you want to write about breast cancer. You know this is much too broad a topic for several reasons -- 1. You'll get about 12 million hits on Google and 2. There are entire books written on the topic. How can you do just to such a broad topic -- YOU CAN'T.

The next thing many students want to do is add another word like diagnosis, treatments, causes or signs. Again, too broad, you'll get about 11,999, 990 hits in Google. Instead think of one type of treatment, such as chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, hormonal therapy, holistic medicine, even experimental. This is still broad, but we are getting there.

At this point you may want to do some more research on a particular kind of chemotherapy, such as TAC Taxotere, adriamycin and cytoxan, to further narrow your options. Of course, even this is likely to bring up several thousand hits in Google. But there are other ways to narrow your focus.

We know that breast cancer affects both men and women, and we can also break down by gender and age. In addition, we can further break down by ethnic background. So now if I am looking for African American women and their rates of improvement using the drug regimen, I have probably found a pretty good topic. Or how about breast cancer and mammograms and post menopause and Hispanic women?

Notice these are specific keywords and not general terms like treatment or cause or diagnosis. Combine them all into one search and you are on your way to a solid, narrowly-focused research paper.