You may be wondering why we need to find alternative terms for our concepts. When you search library catalogues, electronic databases and the World Wide Web, a computer searches for references with the term you type in. Unfortunately, computers will ONLY search for that term and you may miss lots of useful information in other references. So to search effectively, you may need to search on several alternative terms or keywords. You need to remember that terms can vary from country to country.
Spelling can also vary from country to country.
As we have already seen, you can find alternative keywords in general and subject dictionaries. Another useful resource to check is a Thesaurus , a publication that gives synonyms. You can look at a general Thesaurus like the Macquarie Thesaurus , or check a specialised Thesaurus. You can see that we have some more terms we could use as alternative keywords. So far we have discussed finding keywords for a particular concept, but generally we want to find resources that contain more than one term or concept.