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ESOL Education: (iii) Use subject headings

A one-stop-shop for finding books, journal articles, and more on ESOL education topics

Step E(iii) Modify your search query with keywords/phrases and subject headings

Now that you have saved some results to take a look at later, you can modify your search query to find other results.

Sometimes you might need to modify your search query if you haven't found any relevant results. Read the boxes to the right to learn how.

Tip 1 - Add or remove keywords or "key phrases"

If you don't have enough relevant results with your original search query, it could be to do with your keyword or key phrase choice.

  • If you have too many results, add another keyword or key phrase.
  • If you have too few results, remove a keyword / key phrase, or add more synonyms to a keyword, connecting them with the Boolean Operator OR 

Tip 2 - Incorporate Subject Headings into your search

Subject Headings are kind of like tags to a picture or blog post - but not quite.

Just like how tags to a picture or a blog post indicate what the picture or post is about, subject headings are terminology which describes what a resource, such as a book or a journal article, is about.

Unlike tags, only a database representative, called an indexer, can assign Subject Headings to the resource. So, these are like official tags.

An example of Subject Headings is below:

Anna's Example: Searching on Subject Headings in Academic Search Complete

 

Subject Headings in record in Academic Search Complete

How to find useful sources by running a Subject Search
  1. Select the record of a source that you like. 

     

  2. Look at the Subject Headings in that record, if any are available. These are also called 'Subjects' or 'Descriptors'.

     

  3. Link to a useful subject heading to run a search on that subject, eg. in the screenshot below, you could select SOCIAL Media

     

  4. The database will run a subject search on the subject you selected. Toggle back to the Advanced Search screen or select Edit or Modify to edit your search, depending on the database you are in.

     

  5. Add your previous keywords, and run the search. You may need to set your filters again.
Anna's Example: Searching on Subject Headings in Academic Search Complete

 

Subject Headings in record in Academic Search Complete

This video provides more info on Subject Headings are and how they can help:

Tip 3 - Search in another database

Your keywords or key phrases could be good choices, but the database you are searching within may not be. Try your keywords / key phrases in another database.

Use GALILEO to search all of the Libraries' databases at once.

But if the result set becomes too overwhelming, it might be more helpful to search within a collection of databases, for example, a group of EBSCOhost databases. 

 

To search across EBSCOhost databases at once:

Enter any of EBSCOhost's databases, eg. Academic Search Complete

> Select 'Choose Databases'

> Select the other databases you want to include in your search.

> OK.

Note: Avoid 'Select All' databases - the search speed will be slow, and it is searching across multidisciplinary content which defeats the purpose of picking subject specialty databases.