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TALON MODULE 6: Finding Periodical Articles
Subject Searching in Databases

A subject heading (sometimes called a descriptor) is a word or phrase that describes the content of a book or periodical article. Remember the controlled vocabulary we’ve already mentioned? People (called indexers) assign these subject headings to books and articles from this predefined list of terms and phrases. All books are assigned subject headings and these are searchable using the catalog. Periodical databases also have subject headings for every article that is indexed. When you look for articles by subject, you are searching these terms in each article’s subject field.

Why is a controlled vocabulary important? Let’s take an example. If you are looking for information on, say, automobiles, it would be confusing if half the articles were under “automobiles” and the other half under “cars.” Thus, advantages of subject searching include:

Every topic or concept has its own individual heading, which provides what is called low recall and high precision. That is, you may not get many articles on your topic (low recall), but what you do retrieve will be relevant to what you are looking for (high precision).

A controlled vocabulary helps guarantee that even though a topic may have various synonyms, researchers need consult only one subject heading.

For instance, say you are interested in writing about the history of comic strips and are consulting Humanities Index, a periodical index covering literature, journalism, history, and other disciplines in the humanities. Several subject headings on comic strips may come to mind. What term or phrase do you think would be used to obtain articles on this topic?

Comic strips

Comics

Comic books, strips, etc.

Funnies

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Content Authored by
Laurie Preston & Jack Bales
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