Always remember databases can't think. Whether you're searching Google or a library database, it doesn't know that when you type "girls" you might mean teenage girls, or Hispanic girls, the TV show "Girls," or that you actually want information about all females, regardless of age.
Always look at your search results and ask yourself:
Since subject terms are created to organize, and not the way we naturally speak and think, finding the relevant subject term can be hard.
A good strategy is to start with a keyword search, and find a source that is generally on your topic in those results. Once you click on the title for that source, you will find the related subject terms in the record.
You can also Ask a Librarian! We work with subject terms all the time and understand how they are organized, so we can show you where to find them and how to use them.
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.
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.
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:
Subject search when:
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.