Old School Search Lesson Plan
How to effectively create a list of keywords for search engine research.
Duration: One hour to one hour and a half.
Could take significantly longer for complex, new, scientific or technical topics.
1. Develop synonyms for researching different topics.
2. Use a Thesaurus to identify synonyms as a strategy for generating keywords.
Learn how hypernyms and hyponyms can assist in broadening or narrowing a research focus.
(For the non-linguists among us hyponym is a term that denotes a subcategory of a more general class: “Chair” and “table” are hyponyms of “furniture." "Musical instrument" is a hypernym of "guitar" because musical instruments include guitars.)
3. Critically analyze search engine inquiries using a variety of keyword combinations. Develop search word matrix.
Explain that selecting the right keywords is a mandatory task before you start searching as part of an old school search strategy. Stress the need to use a Thesaurus, and to consider synonyms of search words if your searching has not yet led to useful research results. Stress the need to be patient in your quest for information.
CoronadoIP Search Engine Lesson Plan
Five minutes
Working by yourself practice you wrist motions using your mouse to make sure you are feeling flexible and ready to copy and paste.
Forget about all this synonym, hyponym, hypernym stuff. No need to deal with any of this since CoronadoIP already understands all the words and the concepts they represent.
Use reports of new scientific findings to execute searches.
Exercise: Go to the current issue of Nature Magazine. Copy the abstract from the article Direct visualization of secondary structures of F-actin by electron cryomicroscopy into the concept search box using your limbered up wrist.
Enter search.
Get back a list of all of the patents that are closest to the abstract. Start exploring if this is really a novel idea and how this might impact your research and grants.
Done.
Search the Way You Think.
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