Take the Information Literacy Test to excel in assessing, evaluating, and applying information effectively. Use flashcards and multiple-choice questions with comprehensive explanations. Prepare for success!

Multiple Choice

Identify which of the following is a keyword search.

Keyword searching centers on core terms that describe the topic, dropping question words and connecting phrases. The phrase “Vaccine effectiveness variants” uses only content words that represent the main ideas: vaccine, effectiveness, and variants. This compact string targets the central concepts you want to find information about, making it easy for a database to match on the relevant topics and pull in related terms as well. The other options read like full questions rather than a concise set of topic terms. They include question words such as who, which, and how, plus a verb that signals a natural-language query rather than a focused keyword search. That structure tends to produce results based on conversational wording instead of indexing terms, which is less effective when you want to pull together diverse sources on a topic.

Keyword searching centers on core terms that describe the topic, dropping question words and connecting phrases. The phrase “Vaccine effectiveness variants” uses only content words that represent the main ideas: vaccine, effectiveness, and variants. This compact string targets the central concepts you want to find information about, making it easy for a database to match on the relevant topics and pull in related terms as well.

The other options read like full questions rather than a concise set of topic terms. They include question words such as who, which, and how, plus a verb that signals a natural-language query rather than a focused keyword search. That structure tends to produce results based on conversational wording instead of indexing terms, which is less effective when you want to pull together diverse sources on a topic.