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

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflections on Kuhlthau Article

     Since returning to school after thirty years, searching for information has been both the foundation and bane of my existence. Most of my classes have required research in one form or another, typically culminating in a final project or paper. In general, I love the idea of research and I fully understand how important research is in gaining and furthering knowledge. However, in practice, I have experienced great uncertainty and anxiety in the process of seeking information. Long gone are the days when research is limited to the physical resources of a local library. Suddenly, I have access to a whole world of information right at my fingertips. Access to virtually unlimited information sounds like a good thing. But I have found it to be extremely overwhelming. Just coming up with an idea for a research topic can be challenging enough. Sorting through great quantities of information which often seems inconsistent and conflicting can be down right discouraging. Typi...
Read more

Information about Information

PART 1        It is strange how confusing living in the information age can be. Real news, fake news. How is it even possible to tell the difference? This week's instruction was centered on just this dilemma. I was pretty excited to learn that there are some specific techniques that can be used to help determine what is reliable information and what is not. My first assignment was to read a fact-check page from the DigiPro project. The topic that caught my attention was, "When did we begin standing for the national anthem?" I am not certain why I expected this article to simply be a history lesson. I was reminded in the introduction that the tradition of standing for the national anthem has a much more political context in US sports, particularly the NFL. Much of this article was primarily informational in nature, and I found it to be quite interesting. However, most of the embedded links led to a page on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine stating that the URL h...
Read more

The Background Search

 This week, I was asked to respond directly to questions, so I am including them in this post. Part One: Background Information from a Web Search   1.      What is your research topic? This should be a general area of interest at this point. It should NOT be a research question yet. Spanish Flu: The Corona Virus Pandemic is often compared to the 1918 Pandemic often known as the Spanish Flu   2.      Select an unfamiliar Search Engine or Metasearch Engine from the list linked in the lesson and run a search for your topic. DO NOT use Google or Wikipedia for this part of the assignment!   Wait!!! There are other ways to search for information???   a.        Tell me which search engine or metasearch engine you used.     Bing b.        What new ideas or information did you find about the topic?    Just browsing brought up actua...
Read more