Research Databases

The controlled vocabulary is the most powerful feature of research databases and nearly all of them expose their controlled vocabulary for you to use in their search results. In many cases this takes the form of a sidebar with options for refining or limiting your search. The brief video below shows how this works in the Web of Science database. The same techniques can be used in many other databases, although the location of the sidebar or of the items in the sidebar, as well as their names, may be different.

From the sidebar, most databases give you the option to limit your results by applying certain subject terms. Others also allow you to refine your results by excluding terms you're not interested in.

You can also usually access the controlled vocabulary from the full records of each individual article or paper. After clicking the title of the article in the results list to open the full record, look for a section called "subject terms" or "key words" or something similar. They are often hot-linked. Clicking on one of these or copying it into the search box will find everything in the database that matches that specific term.

Subject Term Example

Say you want to learn about green construction. Here are a list of "official" subject terms for that area:

• CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY
• CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS
• DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION
• ENERGY CONSUMPTION
• ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT
• SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE
• SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
• SUSTAINABLE BUILDINGS
• SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION

Note that none of them uses the term "green!"

Here's a quick way to find subject terms for your topic:

1. Using a keyword search in the TITLE field for your topic (The TITLE field will help narrow your results to only the best ones.)
2. Look at the citation (the brief description) information.
3. Note the topics in the SUBJECT area that are similar to your keyword.
4. Re-do your search using the Subject terms you noted. 

For the example above, there are two ways you can conduct your subject search:

1. Use the most common terms and perform a SUBJECT search (easiest)

2. Use OR to contatenate all of the subject terms together (most accurate)

When you have your keywords, you need to look for synonyms of the keywords. The more synonyms you use in your search, the more article results you will get from the database. Many library databases have a thesaurus or a list of subject terms that the database uses to categorize articles. You can use the database's thesaurus find the most relevant and academic terms for your topic.

The Thesaurus or Subject Terms list is usually located near the top of the database page.

Use the linked guide to find out how to search a database thesaurus.