Keyword vs Subject Heading: What's the Difference?
Keyword
Keywords are less specific than subject headings. Using a keyword tells the search engine to: find anything tagged with this term, regardless of how the term relates to the information.
Searching for the keyword Best would pull:
Title: "The Best Ways to Manage your Employees"
Subject: Best Practices--Management, Best Practices
Publisher: Best Books, Inc.
Author: Dr. Ann Best
Example: searching for a word in Instagram and pulling top search results, but not searching for a specific hashtag.
Subject Heading
Subject headings are more specific. They function like a specific hashtag. They are usually predetermined words that are designed to fit a specific topic. Management is an established subject heading. Subject headings are associated with broader terms and narrower terms.
Library of Congress example for Management Subject Heading: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85080336.html.
Example: Searching for #management in Instagram.
Choosing Between Subject Headings and Keywords
Search Term Categories
You can put your search terms into many different categories, including:
- subject
- keyword
- title
- author
- publisher
- and many more!
When Keywords Work Best
If you do not want to find research by a specific author or with a specific title, use keywords.
Keyword searches are beneficial because:
- they find a wide range of related material (and often some unrelated material) on a topic
- the amount of material found will give you a general overview of what is available on a specific topic
- you don't have to focus as much on using the right words in your search
- results in a keyword search can direct you to specific subjects if you want to find materials associated with a specific subject heading
Example: A simple keyword search using the basic search box on the library homepage produces over 13,000 results in libraries worldwide:
Keywords will help you get to most of the information you need. You do not need to use subject headings to find information. However, subject headings can help you narrow a search to find more relevant results.
Narrowing with Subject Headings
Use articles that you find in your initial searches to help you find more information on your topic. A great way to do this is to find subject headings that are applied to articles that match your topic.
For example:
One of the articles in the 13,000 + search results looks relevant to your topic. When you click on the title of the article and go to the article description, you see several relevant subject headings.
You can then target your search in the Advanced Search option using subject headings that you find in your initial search. (This may take several tries to find the most useful combination of subjects. If you do not find enough, try switching back to keyword or adjusting your search terms.)
Here is an example of an advanced search combining two relevant search terms from the article we selected above. In this example, we adjusted the search to include all major business and management databases.
When these search results are limited to full-text peer-reviewed articles, you will see a much more manageable list of search results that are relevant to your topic:
