Searching by Subject
Searching for keywords is a great strategy to start looking for information about your topic. But a keyword search may give you too many or too few results.
Searching by subject headings is often the most effective and precise way to find relevant sources. Sometimes databases will refer to subject headings as descriptors.
Subject headings describe the content of each source listed in a database. Indexers have created a list of words or phrases to uniformly describe the topics each source addresses.
Do you remember all the keywords we brainstormed for “obese” and “youth? You could run many keyword searches using different combinations of these keywords. Or search for the subject headings: Obesity in children or Obesity in adolescence.
Identifying Subject Headings
It is usually not easy to guess which subject headings are used in a given database. Here is how to find out:
- start by doing a keyword search
- browse through your list of results and identify a couple of relevant sources
- look at the subject headings assigned to these sources
- most often they are live links you can click on to find other sources about the same subject. Or you can write the subject headings down and start a new search by subject.