In the following video, you'll learn how to use a combination of keywords and subject terms to search effectively for information.
Transcript
When on the hunt for a perfect set of search results,
there are certain tools and techniques that you can use to help dig up the best resources.
The two most important are keywords and subject terms.
Keywords are the words and phrases that are typed into a search box
and dictate how many results you find in a search and how relevant they are to your topic.
The problem with using keywords is that everybody thinks differently and describes concepts differently.
Take this image.
What would you call this?
You may immediately think pirate ship, but someone else might think just ship or boat,
or sailboat, or frigate—or how about schooner?
When you’re doing research, try to think of lots of different words and phrases to describe your research topic.
Think of synonyms, alternate spellings, or combinations of words that define it.
Don’t be afraid to do lots of searches to see what combinations work the best.
Also, remember that you can use the OR Boolean operator between keywords in a search,
so that you can search several of them at once.
Sometimes it can be hard to think of different keywords,
so let the database help by using its subject terms.
Subject terms, sometimes called subjects, descriptors, or controlled vocabulary,
are the words and phrases that the database has selected to represent specific concepts
and are assigned to each resource to help describe it accurately.
You can find these in the database’s records.
Subject terms not only summarize a resource and provide great keywords to use in later searches,
but they also are hyperlinked.
Click on one to conduct a brand-new search, pulling works that have that specific subject term in their records.
In an advanced search box, you can also type one or more search terms
and then search them only in the subject term fields.
Just remember that you need to use the words and phrases
that have been defined as subject terms in the database for this to work.
Trying a variety of keywords in different combinations, along with subject terms,
should help you find research gold in most of the databases or book catalogs.
As always, librarians are available to help,
no matter how buried the resources seem to be!
The library’s website is a great place to start your research. Here is a breakdown of the different search tools available directly on the library's homepage.
The top search bar is labelled "Start Your Search". Use this search engine (sometimes referred to as the "Discover" search) to search across hundreds of databases and the Leatherby Libraries catalog. Your results will include journal articles, e-books, physical books, and even photos and videos. If you're doing research for an assignment and you need to use peer-reviewed journal articles, this is the best place to start. Simply enter in some keywords based on your topic and click Search to see your results. In the next section, we’ll explore this powerful search tool in detail.
The middle search box is for the library catalog. This will search for physical items such as books, movies, and reference titles, as well as some e-books.
The bottom search box is for the Journal A-Z List. This resource can be used to determine if we have access to a particular journal or newspaper. It can also be used to read entire issues of any journal we have access to. Please note that this is used to search for entire journals and newspapers rather than individual articles. To perform a search for articles using keywords, use the "Start Your Search" tool instead.
At the bottom of the page are some additional ways to access the many databases offered by the Leatherby Libraries. We encourage you to take some time to explore these on your own!
In the following video, you will learn how to use the Start Your Search tool on the library's website.
Closed captioning is available on the video and the transcript is also available below.
Transcript
In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to start your research using the Start Your Search tool on the library's homepage.
Start Your Search is a powerful tool that searches through most of the library's over 400 different databases, as well as our physical collections. It can yield many results across a wide variety of subjects.
If we want to start with a broad, exploratory search, we could enter a few keywords directly into the search box on the library's homepage and click Search. Alternatively, we can click below the search box on Advanced Search to gain more options. For today's search, I will choose the Advanced Search option.
At this point, you may be prompted to sign in if you are off campus.
If you are on campus, you should automatically be signed in.
On the Advanced Search screen, you'll notice three boxes available for building a search.
A helpful trick is to separate each topic component into a separate search box and combine them using Boolean operators.
These Boolean operators default to AND, but you can change them to OR or NOT.
I'm going to leave them set to AND since we want results that include the keywords from all three of these search boxes.
For this example, I'm interested in learning about how artificial intelligence affects student creativity.
The first component of my topic is artificial intelligence.
However, I want to retrieve results that use variations of this term, such as AI or A.I.
When typing in keywords with common variants, Start Your Search will often suggest common searches, including ones with alternative keywords and synonyms.
I can click on the suggested text to use it for my search.
The word OR between the search terms tells Start Your Search to bring up results with any of those terms within the box.
In the second box, I'm going to enter the second component of our topic: creativity.
But what if I also want to find results that have the term creative?
We can retrieve both of these results in the same search using a technique called truncation.
I can do this by typing in creativ*.
This asterisk (*) acts as a wildcard that will search for any word endings.
Lastly, I'm going to include the term college students.
You'll notice I'm putting this phrase within quotation marks to ensure that the two words are searched together as a phrase.
With my keywords in place, I'm going to click Search to see my results.
Before diving into the results, there are a few quick ways we can narrow them down.
Start Your Search will bring up a wide variety of resources, including articles, books, e-books, and more.
All of these resources can be helpful depending on your research goals.
However, for many research projects and assignments, you'll be primarily focusing on academic sources,
which include:
Articles from academic journals
E-books
Conference proceedings
Books
We can narrow our results to only academic sources by:
Opening the Source Type drop-down menu
Selecting these types of sources
Clicking Apply
Much of the content in academic sources is peer-reviewed, but not always.
To remove non-peer-reviewed sources from our results, we can click the Peer Reviewed box.
You’ll learn more about peer review in a later part of the module,
but for now, remember this is one way you can narrow your results.
Another way to ensure your results meet your research needs is by limiting the publication date.
How far back you want to go depends entirely on your topic and research question.
For this example, I will limit the results to the last five years
by clicking on the drop-down menu and changing the date range from All Time to Past 5 Years.
Remember, searching is an iterative process,
meaning you often find better results by continuing to refine your search parameters based on what you find.
If we didn’t find what we were looking for the first time, we could try:
Adding or removing keywords
Adjusting the selected filters
The best way to learn how to use this tool is to explore it for yourself.
And remember, you can always reach out to a librarian for assistance if you get stuck.
While the "Start Your Search" tool includes results from the library catalog, it is often faster to search the catalog directly if you know you want to locate a physical item. The library catalog can be directly accessed from the Leatherby Libraries homepage.
By using the drop-down menu on the catalog search, you can easily search by title, author, keyword, and more. If you already know the title of the book you are looking for, the title search is often the fastest way to find it.
The keyword search will bring results that have your chosen keyword(s) in either the title, author's name, subject, and/or content notes. For example, a keyword search for James Baldwin will bring up results that are both by and about James Baldwin.
To find only works written by James Baldwin, do an author search for Baldwin, James. Note that the format is last name, first name. Depending on the name, you may need to specify the author based on their birth year and (if applicable) death year before seeing the results. In the example below, there are three authors with the name Baldwin, James. Each is differentiated by their birth and death years.
From the results list, you can find out an item's:
You can also click on a title to see more information about it, such as its table of contents, summary, and subject headings.
Subject headings are a fantastic way to both learn more what an item is about as well as a way to find additional items in the library that are about the same subject. From the detailed view of an item, you can see the list of subject headings.
To find additional titles with the same subject heading, click on the blue text.
Now let’s look at another method for finding sources that you may have not considered before. Watch the video below to see how using existing bibliographies can help you find sources for your own research!
Check your understanding of Searching by completing the practice quiz below.
You may also open the quiz in a new tab or window using this link: Searching - FFC Practice Quiz