Video link: Subject terms search
Begin transcript
Visual: Academic Search Complete advanced search page
Narration: This short video will demonstrate how to find subject terms and how to use them to focus your search in a journal articles database
I’m going to start with a very basic search …
Visual: Typing sports and disabilities into first two search boxes
Narration: I’ll try searching sports and disabilities and click on Search
Visual: Results list in Academic Search Complete from sports and disabilities search
Narration: This will give me a results list of over 2,000 articles. What I can do to focus my results is look at the subject lines and get ideas for other terms to search.
For instance, there’s Sports for people with disabilities, there’s Athletes with disabilities there’s Paralympics… a lot of different ideas. So what I can do is take one of those, copy it, go up to the top and run a new search.
Visual: Advanced search page - Pasting Sports for people with disabilities into search box
Narration: I’m going to paste in that subject term and then over here I’m going to
Visual: Drop-down menu from Select a Field
Narration: Select a field and choose Subject. This is telling the database that I want ONLY articles that are about Sports for people with disabilities.
Visual: Results list in Academic Search Complete from Sports for people with disabilities subject search
Narration: When I re-run that search, I get just 292 results; a much more focused results list.
If this turns out to be not quite what I was looking for, and I want to try something different,
Visual: Copy and paste Paralympics into search box
Narration: I can re-run the search with a different subject term
Visual: Results list in Academic Search Premier from Paralympics Subject search
and see which one works best for my topic. And if you have any questions,
Visual: Library home page
Narration: you can always Ask A Librarian.
OASIS