Teenagers vs. adolescents, counsellors vs. counselors...

...women vs. gender – which would you pick as your search terms?

The words you type in the search box on the library catalogue, PsycINFO, Google or any other search screen can make a huge difference to the results you find. Take the first example: teenagers vs. adolescents. Look them up in a dictionary or thesaurus and you will probably conclude that they are interchangeable and you could use either. However, look them up in PsycINFO and ‘teenagers’ returns less than 5000 results, while ‘adolescents’ returns a staggering 143,000 results. Why? Because ‘adolescents’ is a more academic term than ‘teenagers’ and PsycINFO is a database full of academic research articles. Try the same search on Google and you get the opposite result, with ‘teenagers’ returning more hits. The reason? Google finds web pages, web pages are generally not very ‘academic’ and neither is the word ‘teenagers’. The lesson? Tailor your search terms to the source you are searching.

As for the difference counsellors vs. counselors, it’s a little more simple. The first spelling is British; the second American. Increasingly the difference doesn’t matter when searching. For example, PsycINFO automatically searches for either spelling so returns the same number of results whichever you choose. However, neither Google nor the library catalogue has this facility, so you will need to try both. Then again, if you only want British articles, then perhaps it’s good that they don’t search for the American spelling at the same time...

Finally, women vs. gender – this is an example of when you have little choice but to try them both separately. They have different meanings, but can be used interchangeably or, indeed, differently dependent on the context. You will also need to refer to a thesaurus for further alternatives: female, feminist, equal opportunities…