Keyword searching & search tips: Subject searching

What are subject headings?

Subject headings describe the content of each item in a database. You can use these headings to find items on the same topic.

Usually it is not easy to guess which subject headings are used in a given database. Let's take an example from the phone book's yellow pages which also use subject headings. If you look for the heading "Movie Theatres," you will find nothing. Movie theatres are listed under the heading "Theatres -Movies."

How can you find out which subject headings are used?

Knowing the right subject headings to use will help make your searching more precise.  However, how can you find the subject headings for your particular database?

• Look to see if your database has an online thesaurus/index that you can browse to find the subject heading(s) that best for your topic.

Another method for finding subject headings on your topic is to:

• do a keyword search using words or phrases describing your topic;
• browse through your results and choose two or three relevant results;
• look at the Subject or Descriptor field in those relevant records, note the terms used, and keep a list of them to use in future searches;
• redo your search using the subject or descriptor terms you identiffied in the previous step.

Your results will be much more precise than those from your initial keyword search.