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How to improve your search results using controlled vocabulary.
Using “Controlled Vocabulary” is a much more efficient way to do your research.
A controlled vocabulary has one term for each concept.
So for example, if you were searching for information about fuel efficient cars some articles may use the term vehicles or
automobiles, instead of cars. To make sure you cover everything, you could do multiple searches.
Like the examples below.
But there is an easier way. Find the SUBJECT TERM that the database is using for your topic so you only have to do one
search and still maximize your results.
Lets go to a good general database “Academic Search Premier”.
I will show you an example.
I going to type cars and fuel efficiency into the search boxes.
Notice, I did not type in a complete sentence.
I entered keywords.
The search produced over 2000 documents, or "hits".
This is way too many documents to go through to find information on my topic.
Look at the SUBJECTS list under the first article. Notice how your search words are in BOLD type.
Car is in BOLD type. But it is used with "New Car Dealers".
This demonstrates that by doing a keyword search the database is retrieving documents that have specific words you used even if
they are not necessarily related to your topic.
These are called "false hits" and are time wasters.
You can use Controlled Vocabulary to filter out articles that may include your keywords,
but do not really focus on your topic.
Select an article from your search results that most closely matches your topic.
Click on the title.
Look at the SUBJECT TERMS list and look for the keywords that you used.
I don't see the words "cars" or "fuel efficiency" but I do see "Automobiles - Fuel Consumption".
"Automobiles-Fuel Consumption" is a Subject Term used in this database for this topic.
We could click on this link and see all the articles under this Subject Term
or we can do another search using this Subject Term and something else.
Because "automobiles-fuel consumption" is a very broad topic, I would probably add more search terms to narrow down my topic.
To further get our search results to a more manageable level use the limiters on the left hand side of the page.
Click on the "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" button.
You can also limit the publication date.
Now let's look at how many hits we have.
Now see how this is a more maneagable amount of articles about your topic.
Subject Headings can save you time.
Please do the exercise.
Did you try the example?
How did you do?
If you tried the “death penalty” and “women” example, did you notice that the database uses
the SUBJECT TERM “capital punishment” instead of “death penalty”?
It also uses “gender” instead of “women”.
Be advised! Controlled vocabularies are not always the same across different databases.
Also, controlled vocabularies are called different names such as
Subject Terms, Index Terms, Subject Headings or Thesaurus
If you can’t find what you are looking for after 20 minutes of searching, just ask a librarian for help.
Thanks for watching this tutorial!