A synonym is a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language.

Using these will allow you to broaden your search but remain on topic while doing so.

You need to demonstrate an understanding of all the terms, know the depth of information required and the limit needed for your search.

To move from topic to keywords, you will need to pull the main ideas from your research topic. 

These keywords will become your search terms for finding academic information.

Keywords are important as they are the driving force behind your search and what the search tool will use to match to results. Your keywords will influence the success of your search.

Too many Keywords may lead to information overload and fill your search results with information that is not useful.

Keep it simple to start with. You can always go back to the search after evaluating your results and tweak the keywords by using synonyms

Keywords are the main ideas central to the question that you are trying to answer. They give direction for your search & provide boundaries. The example below demonstrates the selection of keywords from a question. 

You can carry out a phrase search by using “  “ quotes to enclose specific phrases like “education policy”. It helps to cuts down on irrelevant results.

Phrase searching finds documents containing an exact phrase or sentence rather than containing a set of keywords in any order. A phrase search of a database or search engine will retrieve only that set of words when they appear next to each other and in the same order.