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Learn to Research

A guide that will teach you the basic steps to completing research for your assignments.

Resources and Tools

Find Your Keywords

  • Keywords are one of the building blocks of your overall research question
  •  These are the subjects of interest that you want to write about. 
  • Keywords are often nouns (people, places, things, ideas, concepts) and they are specific.

For example:

Using our research question,

"Do Albertans who are exposed to air pollution from oil refineries suffer from more respiratory diseases?"

we might consider these keywords:

This image shows various keywords that could be used to find resources on your topic. The word pollution has the keywords of pollutants and pollute. Related terms to pollution are chemicals, poisons, poisonous gas, toxins, and airborne toxins. Respiratory disease has the keywords of lungs and lung disease. Related terms to respiratory disease are breathe, shortness of breath, asthma, air quality, and smog.

Click the image below to see our tutorial on choosing relevant keywords.

You can also view a recording of a class teaching students about choosing keywords on YouTube.

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