Searching: The Words You Use--Subject Terms and Boolean Operators

Part 1: Looking up subject terms

The first search term I entered into Academic Search Complete was Influenza epidemic 1918-1919. This search term brought up a nice list of possible subject terms after stating:

“The term(s) you entered could not be found. The list below is in alphabetical order.”

INFLUENZA Epidemic, 1918-1919

INFLUENZA Epidemic, 1918-1919—in literature Use INFLUENZA Epidemic, 1918-1919, in literature 

INFLUENZA Epidemic, 1918-1919, in literature 

INFLUENZA epidemiology

 

There are then possible subject terms related to influenza in birds and animals among several pages of other possible terms. Additional terms of interest to me included:

 

INFLUENZA Pandemic, 1918-1919 Use INFLUENZA Epidemic 1918-1919

 

The second search term I decided to enter was H1N1 Virus which brought up:

 

H1N1 virus Use INFLUENZA A virus, H1N1 subtype

 

I clicked on that just to see what details would come up and was delighted to discover great advice in the scope note on how to differentiate between the virus associated with the Spanish flu pandemic and the 2009 version of H1N1.

 

Part 2: Reflection

 

I did not even know there was an entire database dedicated to finding appropriate subject terms related to a given research topic. It is nice to know that even when doing research, one does not have to reinvent the wheel. Most of what I considered to be a bit overwhelming when trying to find information for research papers has tended to revolve around figuring out how to narrow my vague ideas down into a workable topic then finding useful terms that would lead me to books and articles that could be used in my research. The Academic Search Complete database is such an incredible tool! I definitely plan to use it for future papers and projects. I am simply curious as to whether this database is specifically available to university students or if it is a more publicly used resource? Are there similar databases available to use?

Comments

  1. SamOctober 1, 2020 at 12:32 PM

    Hi Robin, these look like helpful subject terms for your topic. Did the "use for" part make sense? When it says "INFLUENZA Pandemic, 1918-1919 Use INFLUENZA Epidemic 1918-1919" it means that the term with "epidemic" is the official subject term, but if you type "pandemic" instead in the subject search it will redirect you to the official term.
    This thesaurus is really just for looking up the subject terms used in Academic Search Complete, and other databases will have their own subject terms that might be slightly different. This database is restricted to WSU students/faculty/staff since the university pays for access, but there are also public, open-access databases that have their own subject terms. For example PubMed uses MeSH (medical subject headings) and has a place where you can look them up.--Sam

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