Journal Search
Journal Search
Find by Subject
Find by Type
Start with a broad search, then narrow with additional terms and filters.
It can be tempting to try to develop the most specific, precise search possible right at the beginning of the search process, but if there are relevant resources out there that use different terminology than you expect, you might never see them if your initial search is too narrow. It can be helpful to begin a search with one or two search terms to see what is available on that topic, then start to narrow down your results by adding additional terms and filters.
Follow an idea across multiple articles by tracing citations.
If you want to see what theories or concepts inspired the author(s) of a paper you have found, look at their citation list and search for those older papers that helped lay the foundation for current research. Similarly, you can look for newer research that builds upon existing ideas. In any results page in OneSearch, look for red branching arrow icons beside article titles. The upward arrow will show you newer articles that cite an item in your results list, and the downward arrow will show you older articles that are cited as sources by that item.
By default, OneSearch retrieves results that use your keyword terms anywhere in the title, subject, or body text of an item. Subject searching is a way to retrieve more specific results, because subject terms describe what a book, article, or other resource is primarily about.
When using OneSearch in Advanced Search Mode, you can use keyword searching, subject searching, or a combination of both strategies to find the results that you need for your research. Many researchers will begin a search using only keywords and then modify their search to include one or more subject terms once they find ones relevant to their topic.
| Keywords | Subject Terms |
|---|---|
| Natural language - describing a topic in your own words | Limited number of accepted subject headings used by databases to describe an item's content |
| Flexible - keywords are a great place to start exploring available resources on your topic | Inflexible - you need to know the exact phrasing used in a subject heading |
| OneSearch interprets all searches as keyword searches by default | Must specify "Subject" as the search field in OneSearch (Advanced Search) |
| May retrieve irrelevant results due to imprecise language | Results are usually very relevant to the topic |
| May retrieve too many or too few results | Can be used to hone in on a specific subtopic |
For more information about using subject terms, see the "Subject Searching" page of this guide (link opens in a new window).
Wildcard searching is a way to expand your search results to account for spelling variations by replacing one or more letter in a search term with a wildcard character.
Question Mark (?): used in the middle of a search term to account for single-character spelling variations
Asterisk (*): used at the end of a search term to account for all possible endings of that word
Content directly reused: Utah State University Libraries. (n.d.) "Searching with Subject Terms" . Retrieved July 16, 2024. USU Libraries' work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (all links open in a new window).
