Keywords and Subject Headings - Two Ways of Searching2

Keywords and Subject Headings - 2 ways of Searching

Let's explore a different way of searching - the subject heading.

Outside of the Internet, books and journal articles are found through specific databases, usually operated through libraries.

In this setting, there is an opportunity to add some really helpful options to search tools.

It starts with a descriptive record that might look like this:

How do you search with subject headings?

• Find a subjects option next to the search box

• Do a keyword search, open up the full descriptive record for one of the results, and click on a subject link

Keywords - Great for quick searching; required for Net searching. Can miss things and usually get some irrelevant results.

Subject heading searching - Great for finding more on the topic when keywords miss things. Only available in some databases.

Find links to subject headings, usually in the column to the left of results.

Use subject headings when:

• there are several ways you could describe your topic
• you are getting a lot of results that are not relevant
• you want to see most or even everything in the database on the topic.

• Let's break this down a bit:

Here's a search on Abraham

Lincoln. Results look good.

But what's this? One of the results

is for that crazy movie,

Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter.

How did that get here???

Don't you just wish you could tell

Google, "I only want Lincoln the

president, not some foolish movie."

You could try adding keywords, but you'd still get some results that don't work.

Google can't do that, but library catalogs and many academic databases can.

This is why you so often get strange

results when you do searches. Google

can only find words. It can't figure out

the context or setting those words fit into.

Recently Google has developed categories to the right of common topics. Now an "Abraham Lincoln search will get you some topic information. But this still doesn't get rid of non-relevant results.

What's context?

It's all the background detail that gives words a setting in real life.

For example, one context of Abraham Lincoln

for the man who lived 1809-1865 and was

president of the United States.

A totally different context is the Abraham Lincoln of the movies where he is in the context (setting) of a vampire hunter.

Google can only find the words "Abraham Lincoln." It displays everything with those words.

It can't figure out context.

This happened because keyword searching

in Google is not smart.

Google finds words. It can't find context.

So keyword searching is great for quick results, but you usually get results you don't want.

Wouldn't it be great if you could put words into a search that could help you find everything on the topic and that didn't have vampire hunter movies when all you wanted was the real Abraham Lincoln?

One more problem - You have to think of

all the right keywords to use.

Is it global warming or climate change

or greenhouse gasses?

What if you miss searching on a keyword

you didn't think of? Will you fail to find

results that you really need?

Probably.

Google makes it possible to find almost anything.

All you have to do is throw words in a

box and out comes a bunch of results

Alternatively, do a keyword search and find a book on topic:

Subject headings only work in databases that have them - library catalogs and some journal databases.

A subject heading search on Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 brought up the following results. Only one of them would have been found through a keyword search on Abraham Lincoln

Keywords work best when you have clear terminology to use.

With a subject heading, I don't need to worry that I haven't thought of the right words or that I will get results that aren't relevant.