Search Strategy: Keyword vs. Subject

• Your term is jargon, very new, technical, or distinctive/unique.
• You don’t know the exact title or author.
• More than one discipline or topic is involved (e.g. autism AND girls)
• You don't know the subject heading. (Keyword searches are a good way to find a subject heading – start with a keyword search on a term, then look at the subject headings of a relevant result and use the subject terms you find in a new search.)

Keyword searching is how we search most online sources like Google. While this usually results in a large set of results, a keyword search will also return anything that has your term or the string of characters anywhere in the record or page, frequently resulting in many irrelevant results.

• You are looking for information about something, someone, or someplace (i.e. books about Mark Twain, not those written by him).
• You want to locate all relevant resources about your topic.
• You are looking for information that may be represented by a term that has many meanings or could occur in various contexts (e.g. “management”). Browse the "subject search results" list to find the Subheading that applies to your topic.
• You want to exclude results which are not about your topic (e.g. Depression, Mental vs. Depressions-1929-United States).

Subject searching allows you to look for categories of information. When a library record for an item is created it is given at least one subject heading, usually several. These are based on a pre-defined (controlled) vocabulary so that all items about the same subject are organized and searchable together. While this usually gives a list of very relevant results, the words chosen as subject terms are not always intuitive or obvious.