Title: Keyword vs. Subject Heading Searching
Course: Library - Library Sandbox > Section: Ontario Tech Library Online: Advanced Searching for Research Articles

Keywords

Keyword searches are used for finding information on Google, the Library website, and databases. When you conduct a search using keywords, the search engine is trying to match all the words that you type to the articles in the database. ^1

Advantages and Disadvantages of Keyword Searching

Advantages | Disadvantages
- Returns lots of results | - Results may not be relevant to your research question
- Easy and intuitive to plan - based on your prior knowledge of a topic | - Selecting the wrong keywords might mean you miss important results

Subject Headings

Subject Headings (also called subject terms,  Thesaurus Headings, Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH terms) are specific tags or descriptors that are assigned to an article based on what the article is about.  Once you find out what the subject headings are for your topic, you can better locate relevant articles by doing a "subject" search using the database's thesaurus. Subject searches are trickier than keyword searches because they are less intuitive and you have to figure out which subject headings work best for your topic. ^1

Advantages and Disadvantages of Subject Headings
Advantages | Disadvantages
- Eliminates the need for multiple synonyms or terms with the same meaning | - Subject headings are unique to specific databases so can't always be transferred between databases
- Locates all the research published on a topic, so you don't miss anything | - Subject headings are assigned by human indexers, so may be subjective or limited by human error
- Won't retrieve irrelevant results that sometimes turn up with keyword searches | - Not all publications are indexed using subject headings so there is potential to miss some literature on your topic

When possible, it's best to use a combination of both keywords and subject headings while searching.

Test Your Knowledge: Keywords & Subject Headings

References

^1 Teaching & Learning, Ohio State University Libraries (n.d.). Choosing & using sources: A guide to academic research. The Ohio State University Pressbooks. Retrieved August 21, 2020, from https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/

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