Welcome to the forums. I edited your post to add some [code]...[/code]
tags around your code. Please be sure to use them in the future to aid readability. 😉
As far as your problem, maybe throw in some temporary debug code to see why the query request is returning FALSE.
$result = mysqli_query($conn, $sql);
// debug
if($result == false) {
die("<pre>".mysqli_error($conn)."\n$sql</pre>");
}
Also, this is dangerously susceptible to SQL injection:
$keyword=$_GET['keyword'];
$sql="SELECT proceedings.id, proceedings.title, proceedings.author, institutions.name
FROM proceedings
INNER JOIN institutions
ON proceedings.institution_code=institutions.institution_code;
WHERE 'title' LIKE '%$keyword%'";
You should either be escaping $keyword
via mysqli_real_escape_string() or else use a prepared statement with bound parameters.