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Topic Development and Starting Your Search

Getting started with your research is often the most difficult part. This guide is designed to help you create a "researchable" topic and get started searching.

Keyword Searching

Most open search boxes (like the one on Google and the library's search box on our homepage) search by keyword.

This means the search engine or database is trying to match exactly what you type in, anywhere that it appears on the page or record. This is why when you type a whole question or sentence you often get advice boards like Yahoo Answers as your first results, and why some pages aren't relevant at all.

It also means that a lot of false hits come up. For instance, if you search just the word "roman", you will get hits for the Roman Empire, romance, the Romanovs, company names that have "Roman" in them (like Roman fashion in London), movie director Roman Polanski, and more.

This is because the database is only matching what you type in: R-O-M-A-N. It cannot assign meaning to the term, so it brings back everything.

Subject Searching

Library resources, on the other hand, are organized by subject.

This means that all information about something has been given a subject heading. This works like the hashtag # in twitter, except more powerful.

In twitter, the #hashtag links you to everything with the same tag, but there might be multiple tags for the same idea: #unitedstates #usa #US #america etc.

But library resources like the catalog & databases use a controlled vocabulary, meaning there's only ONE subject term assigned to an idea: United States

When you click on a subject, you can be sure you are seeing EVERYTHING that has been "tagged" with that same subject. This gets you to relevant resources faster than a keyword search.

When should I use keywords vs. subjects?

 KEYWORD SEARCHING  SUBJECT SEARCHING
 Natural language  Defined "controlled vocabulary"
 Familiar  Not always intuitive
 Searches everywhere in a record or on a page  Searches specific subject terms only
 Flexible  Defined
 Often yields irrelevant results  Subheadings can help to focus results
 May not find all relevant results  Results are usually directly related to the topic

 

Keyword search when:

  • Your term is jargon, very new, technical, or unique (like someone's name).
  • You don't know the exact title or author of a work.
  • More than one discipline or topic is involved. (e.g. autism AND education)
  • You don't know the subject heading. (See the "How do I know what the subject term for my idea is?" box on the left.)

Subject search when:

  • You need information about something, someone, or someplace (i.e. books about Mark Twain, not books by him).
  • You need multiple relevant resources on your topic.
  • Your term might have multiple meanings depending on the context (browsing the Subject section, often located on the side of the page, will help you find the correct subheading).
  • You want to exclude false hits and results that are not on your topic. (e.g. Depression, Mental vs. Depressions-1929-United States)

To cite this LibGuide use the following templates:

APA: Northern Essex Community College Library. (Date updated). Title of page. Title of LibGuide. URL

MLA: Northern Essex Community College Library. "Title of Page." Title of LibGuide, Date updated, URL.