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HLTH 402: Disability Studies: Issues, Research & Policy

Selecting Keywords for Topics in Disability Studies

Selecting keywords for research in disability studies can be challenging for a variety of reasons.

  • Language for naming and describing disability changes over time and varies across regions and cultures.
  • Terms and/or subject classifications used in academic or clinical literature may vary from language used in everyday speech.
  • Some research employs a medical model of disability, and some research uses the social model of understanding disability.
  • There is a debate among people with disabilities about people-first language as opposed to identity-first language.

Source: Finding Language for Your Research Questions in Disability Studies – Fordham University

Search Strategies

When conducting research, the key to successful searching is not in the quantity of search results, but rather how relevant and appropriate they are to the topic.

Whether you are searching the web with a search engine such as Google, or searching a research resource like Omni or another library database, there are some common search techniques that can be employed to improve the efficiency of the search results.

In order to retrieve the most relevant results, you will need to construct a search string.  A search string is a combination of keywords, truncation symbols, and Boolean operators you enter into the search box of a library database or search engine. 

Choosing Relevant Keywords

Identify key words and phrases and brainstorm alternate spellings, related terms, broader terms, or narrower terms.

For example, for a research paper examining the barriers to employment for persons with disabilities. The important concepts from this topic, reduced to keywords, would be:

employment  AND disability AND barriers

Now, think about whether there are other terms that could also be used to describe the topic, including synonyms, related terms, or words and phrases that have similar meaning:

 

Connecting Keywords

Once you have identified the keywords and phrases that describe your topic, the next step is to connect them in a logical way that the database will understand - this is accomplished with the use of Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT.

Databases and many search engines including Google make use of Boolean operators. Understanding how databases interpret your keywords will allow you to execute more specific searches, thereby saving you time while retrieving more relevant results. A database's Help pages will indicate how to construct Boolean searches and which wild cards the database supports.

Boolean operators connect your search words together to either narrow or broaden your set of search results. 

AND - narrows a search by finding records that contain all the terms you have entered.

OR - broadens a search by finding records that contain either or all of the terms you have entered

NOT - narrows a search by finding records that contain one term but not another

Using AND

Use AND in a search to:

  • narrow your results
  • tell the database that ALL search terms must be present in the resulting records

For example: COVID-19 AND disability

Please note that in many, but not all, databases, the AND is implied. For example: Google automatically puts an AND in between your search terms.

Though all your search terms are included in the results, they may not be connected together in the way you want.

Using OR

Use OR in a search to:

  • connect two or more similar concepts (synonyms)
  • broaden your results
  • tell the database that ANY of your search terms can be present in the resulting records

For example: COVID-19 OR Coronavirus

NOT

Use NOT in a search to:

  • exclude words from your search
  • narrow your search, telling the database to ignore concepts that may be implied by your search terms
  • use NOT sparingly, if at all, because you could end up excluding useful search results 

For example: "assistive devices" NOT "adaptive devices"

Phrases

Use phrase searching if you want to ensure that words stay together in a particular order. Phrase searching is accomplished by placing the search terms in quotation marks. 

For example: "assistive technology" "inclusive design"

Rules about phrase searching vary from database to database. Some databases require them (without them an AND would be assumed between each word in your phrase, or worse, the database wouldn't be able to interpret your search); others supply them for you.

The Help Screen of the database you are searching will indicate whether or not quotation marks are required.

Nested Searching

Whenever you have more than one Boolean operator, such as AND and OR, in a search statement, it is necessary to separate them with parentheses. This is known as a "nested searching." 

For example:

(work OR employment) AND (disability OR "persons with disabilities") AND barriers

Nested searching tells the database the proper order in which to search for the keywords.

Operations enclosed in parentheses are performed first followed by the operators outside the parentheses.

Truncation

In many library databases you can also use a truncation symbol to broaden a search.

Truncation is like a shortcut. Placed at the end of the root of a word, a truncation symbol tells the database to search for variant endings of the word, including plurals and singulars.

Truncation symbols vary between databases. The truncation symbol is an asterisk (*).

An example of a truncated search would be:

disab*

The database would interpret the search as disability, disabilities, disabled etc. 

Be careful when using truncation as it can produce unintended results. Only truncate back as far as it would be useful and still on topic.