Identifying essential keywords for your research question - The art of finding your keys

[Voice-over]
Monday afternoon. It started well. The goal of the day was to find keywords in order to find sources, using my research question.
	
Before starting, I thought it was important to be comfortable, so I slipped into my bathrobe.

Then I picked up my research question and I stared it straight in the eye. Nothing happened. 

So I decided I needed tea.
I sat back down and I went to an online encyclopedia for ideas. I’m not sure what I did, but after twenty minutes, I had gone from the “Alzheimer’s Disease” page... to the “Alzheimer’s Disease” page. 

Because Alzheimer’s made me think  of growing old, which made me think of death, which made me think of near-death experiences, which made me think of angels, which made me think of Christmas, which made me think of turkey, which made me think of my grandmother who was just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

And I thought to myself, “I forgot about my tea.” 

So I thought I should try a different method. 

I got out my highlighters because I’ve noticed that at the library, the serious-looking students always use highlighters.

Then I remembered that I could use the mind map method. 

So I wrote the keywords on post-its and I tried to find a way to organize them. I found one, then two, then three, then four.... After 32 tries, I realized I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

[Voice-over]
Anna is right- it’s all a matter of method. You just have to find the right one.

Most of the time, you will start your work based off a topic or a research question given by an instructor. You will be asked to respond to this question by using sources. The goal is then to find these sources using search tools.
How do you do it? Well, by using keywords. Why? Simply because we use keywords to describe the contents of sources and identify them. 
How do you efficiently find this list of keywords?

Let’s go back to Anna’s example with the question: 

“Does the SIRT1 protein play a role in the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease?”
First of all, we identify the main concepts in this question. Here, for example, we have three key concepts:

SIRT1 protein. Treatment. Alzheimer’s Disease. 
There you go. You have your first three keywords that you can use in search tools. However, that’s still not enough. To avoid missing other useful sources, you should break down the concepts by finding:

•	First, their synonyms. The more general term here is “therapy.” We can also look for related concepts, such as “pharmacology.”
•	Secondly, as you know, scientific literature is published mainly in English, but you can also search in other languages that you know. In that case, it’s always useful to use a dictionary or tools specific to certain disciplines, like a thesaurus. 

Now that you have your keywords, it can be useful to organize them to have an overview of all the concepts covered in your research question. 

To do this, there are several methods. For example, we could use a mind map.

Others prefer the table method. 

It’s up to you to decide what works best!

Now that you have found and organized your keywords, you’re ready to use the library’s search tools and the internet to start your research.

[Dialogues]
Anna: So do we use the highlighters or not?