AI for Keyword Searching & Tailoring your Search Terms

Keywords, and phrases, drastically change what kind of content you find in university library databases and in general search engines. On top of this, the information that you share with search engines, and other tools, changes the responses you are provided.

Let's Look at an example:

My end goal is to find the book Workplace Software and Skills by OpenStax. If I search 'free text workplace software', the OpenStax book does not appear on my first page of results. But, if I search 'OER workplace software', the OpenStax is one of the first two results on my first page.

Now that we are thinking about keywords and concepts - let's take a look at a few AI assisted Tools that might be useful:

Elicit helps analyze research papers, and for this section the find themes and concepts across papers helps researchers narrow down their keywords, key phrases, and things they want to exclude from their search.
Semrushhas a keyword research toolkit which allows you to strategize the keywords by cluster, develop combinations of keywords, and discover keywords you might not have otherwise.

Prompt Engineering

Now that you've found your the keywords that work for you and tailored your search terms, let's take a look at one way to improve you experience with AI, through prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is a newer concept (though in all honesty you've already probably honed some of this skill when you ask your friends to do something they'd normally be ambivalent about in a way that makes them excited to join you), that focuses on a users ability to create and interact with AI robustly.

Prompt Engineering Guide- this includes an introduction, techniques, and more that you can reference while you work.
Prompt Engineering courses are also available, like this set of open courses from Learn Prompting
There are more bite size learning pieces about prompt engineering on LinkedIn Learning, which you have access to for free while you are at Texas State