Strategies for Research Subject Searching Vs. Keyword Searching

Now that we have our search terms and know how to combine them to make a good search, we can finally start searching! OneSearch is a good place to start looking for information, as it looks through books, encyclopedias, and articles, but you can use the techniques you've learned in this module in any of the databases linked on the library homepage.

Keyword Searching

The automatic way to search in OneSearch (and in any of our other library resources like EBSCOhost) is something called keyword searching. This is an intuitive way of searching that anyone who has ever Googled something can do. A keyword search occurs when you type your chosen search terms into a search box like Google, OneSearch, EBSCOhost databases, etc. The search engine will look for any pieces of information that match the exact words you typed and give you those as a result. This means that keyword searching gives you every piece of information that might mention your search terms. This has both pros and cons: you will get a lot of information, but not all of it will be as relevant to your topic as you'd like. However, this is a very easy way to search.

When you click on the OneSearch link, you will see a single search box. This is a simple search, which defaults to a keyword search. You can enter one of your search terms in this box to search. In the image below, you can see a simple search for the term African slaves. In the results, you'll see that all of the titles mention the term African slaves, but they aren't very specific to our topic. You'll also see that there are 168,936 results--overwhelming!

Screenshot of a search page

A better way to do a keyword search is to use the Advanced Search option to the side of the main search box. This will allow you to use the search strategies of Boolean operators and truncation. The image below shows an advanced search for our topic. Note that you can click on the "add a new line" option to add a third keyword to your search. You can see that by adding more search terms, I've taken our search results from 168,936 to just 430 results, which is a much more reasonable amount of results, and that the first search result is much more related to our topic than the first result of our initial, less focused search.

Screenshot of a search page

Next, in the picture below, I'm going to see if I can use even more of my research strategies to help my search. I'm going to use OR inside a search box, as well as truncate a word. I truncated my first search term by searching African slave* instead of African slaves, and I used one of my backups for my second search term to see if I could expand my search on that aspect of my topic. You'll see that I now have 1,961 results instead of 430. Using techniques like truncation and OR is especially useful if you ever end up with too few search results.

Screenshot of a search page

Subject Searching

Another way to search is subject searching. In the research context, subjects are words that describe different topics; essentially a set of labels to describe topics in a database or the library catalog. Other terms that are commonly used for subjects are: subject headings or controlled vocabulary.

Each book or article in a library is labeled with a different set of subjects. While subjects do organize the books, they can also be used as a way to search for information on your topic. Since each book or article is labeled with different subject headings, you can search for books or articles through a subject search in the catalog or databases.

Since subject searches look for articles or books that are labelled as being about your topic, you will get more relevant results with a subject search than with a keyword search. To do a subject search in OneSearch, first complete a regular keyword search on your topic, as in the search in the image above. After doing your keyword search, look at the left sidebar. You will see a Subjects option. If you open this up, you will see several subjects that the search engine thinks might match your search.

Screenshot of a search page

Click on the subject that fits your topic best, and you'll find a list of books and articles that have been labeled as about this topic. This means that a subject search is much more focused than a keyword search, and you are much more likely to find better information. In the example below of a subject search, you will see the list of search results go from 1,961 to just 340!

Screenshot of a search page