Background research
If you're having trouble coming up with keywords, try to do a little bit of background research on your topic first. Try searching an encyclopedia to get a broad overview on your topic by searching an encyclopedia.
Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new windowGateway to online art resources: Grove Art Online, comprising the full text of The Dictionary of Art; The Oxford Companion to Western Art; The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics; and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Access restricted to 1 user at a time.
- Metropolitan Museum's Heilbrunn Timeline of the History of Art is a thematic, chronological, and geographical exploration of global art history through The Met collection. The Timeline currently comprises more than 1,000 essays, 8,000 works of art, 300 chronologies, and 3,700 keywords. It is regularly updated and enriched to provide new scholarship and insights on The Met collection.
- Wikipedia is another great place to start your research to get a broad over view of a topic, particularly contemporary art and artists. Be aware that since it can be edited by anyone, not just scholars, it may contain erroneous and biased information about a topic.
Pro tip: check out the external references and links at the bottom of Wikipedia articles. These often provide great leads and potential research sources you can cite.
Brainstorming keywords
Before you begin your search, compile a list of potential keywords related to your topic. For example, let's say you would like to find more information about art made during World War I. You'll need to break your topic in to keywords and then brainstorm alternate keywords based on those.
In this case, our keywords/phrases are:
You may want to do some preliminary research to refine this topic and possibly find something more specific to search for such as:
- People such as Walter Jack Duncan
- Specific artworks like Newly Arrived Troops Debarking at Brest
- Types of art like paintings, illustrations
- Subject matter like women and war
Searching phrases
To search phrases or titles with multiple words, use quotation marks. Putting these terms in quotes means that the words will be searched as a phrase rather than each word separately. For example:
- "Newly Arrived Troops Debarking at Brest"
- "combat artists"
Narrowing & broadening your search
Combine keywords using the AND operator to narrow your topic. For example:
Combine keywords with synonyms using OR to broaden your search. For example:
- "World War I" OR "World War One" OR "Great War"