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The three most common types of searching
Natural language
- Searching in full-sentences or phrases like you would ask a person
- Example: "how many moles are in a litre?"
- Most common search style in Google
- Will not work well with most Library eResource databases
Keyword searching
- Searching with individual words.
- Words tend to be chosen from key ideas.
- When used in databases the entire record or full text is usually searched for your keywords and allows for a large number of results.
- Irrelevant results can occur when your key word is found within multiple record descriptions.
- Common words used in a keyword search will result in an overwhelming number of results.
- Add additional keywords to create a more focused search.
Subject searches
- Use a specific predefined or "controlled vocabulary" such as MeSH headings.
- are used in databases to create customised lists (aka a thesaurus) of words used to tag similar information.
- Use Subject assigned terms to find materials that may use historic terms, synonyms, regional spellings and other variations of a topic.
- Subject searches look only in the Subject Heading or descriptor field for the specific terms used.
- You must know specific Subject terms to get effective results.
- Keyword searching can often help to discover the Subject terms in the results.
