To understand what subject terms are and how using them in your search statements can help you with your research, let's say that you're interested in finding articles that discuss whether people who telecommute are more productive than people who don't.
The keywords for your research are telecommute and productive, since these terms represent the main concepts of your research topic.
To help ensure that your search doesn't miss any relevant articles on this topic, you'll want to identify other terms for telecommute and productive that might be used to describe these concepts. After all, different authors may use different terms to describe the same concepts. So in addition to telecommute, you'll want to use terms like telework, working from home, working at home, etc., and in addition to productive, you could use terms like output or accomplish.
So you could start out your search in a business database such as Business Source Complete, using a search statement such as:
(telecommut* OR telework* OR work* n3 home) AND (productiv* OR output* OR accomplish*)
This search will find all articles in the database that contain some form of the word productive (e.g., productive, productivity) and/or some form of the word output (e.g., outputs, outputted, etc.) and/or some form of the word accomplish (e.g., accomplishment, accomplishing, etc.), along with some form of the word telecommute (e.g., telecommute, telecommuter, telecommuting) and/or some form of the word telework (e.g., telework, teleworker, teleworking) and/or any phrase in which some form of the word work appears within three words (in either order) of the word home (e.g., work at home, working from home).
(For information about how this search statement was constructed, see Creating Effective Search Statements and Using Proximity Operators.)
This search retrieves literally hundreds of articles in Business Source Complete.
But keep in mind that the search retrieved all of the articles that contain your search terms anywhere in the article; the articles retrieved by the search may just mention telecommuting and productivity somewhere in the article, but the articles may not necessarily be about telecommuting and productivity. (Pasquariello's 2007 article from Fast Company, entitled "Grant makers", for instance, discusses a company's use of bonuses to "improve morale and productivity" and mentions that one such award was given to "an engineer who worked from home after being grounded by an ice storm" (p. 32). The article contains the terms productivity and worked from home, but the article doesn't discuss the effects that working from home has on productivity.)
To help ensure that the articles retrieved by your search are actually about telecommuting and productivity, you can take a look at the subject terms that the database has suggested based on your search terms and then try a new search using those subject terms.
Subject terms are assigned to articles by people with special training (often librarians!), based on the content of the article. Subject terms are assigned from a set list of terms, also known as a controlled vocabulary. Assigning subject terms from a controlled vocabulary list helps make it easier to find articles about a particular topic, since all articles about that topic will be assigned the same subject term.
In this case, Business Source Complete's suggested subject terms (which appear on the left-hand side of the search results page) include telecommuting and labor productivity, as shown in the image below:
In this case, articles that focus on telecommuting and/or labor productivity have been assigned the subject terms telecommuting and labor productivity, regardless of what words the articles use for these concepts. Articles that talk about the amount of work done by people working at home or about how much is accomplished by people who telework, for example, would be assigned the subject terms telecommuting and labor productivity, as would articles that actually include either or both of those terms.
Now that you know which subject terms are used in Business Source Complete for the concepts that you're interested in, you can use this information to increase the relevancy of your search results by re-running your search, searching for the suggested subject terms in the subject field of articles in the database, as shown in the image below:
This search retrieves a much smaller number of documents than the previous search did, but the documents retrieved by this search should all discuss the relationship between telecommuting and productivity.
Subject terms may be assigned on the article level as well, and looking at the subject terms assigned to individual articles may help you identify additional terms that may be useful for your research. In the image shown below, for example, in addition to the terms telecommuting and labor productivity, the term flexible work arrangements was also assigned to the article.
Depending on your research needs, you might want to consider adding that term to your search statement, too, so that you'd be searching for (telecommuting OR "flexible work arrangements") AND "labor productivity", again searching for those terms in the subject field.
In summary, then, by using the database's suggested subject terms in your search statement, you no longer need to worry about whether you thought of all of the possible alternatives for your search words. Now that you know that the term telecommuting has been assigned to all articles that focus on telecommuting, for example -- regardless of what words the articles actually used for that concept -- you should be able to find all of Business Source Complete's articles about telecommuting simply by searching for that term in the subject field of articles in the database. And by using the database's subject terms in your search statement, you'll end up with a much smaller and more relevant set of search results, which will help you to more quickly and easily find useful articles to use for your research.
Note that the best way to find which subject terms a database uses for your search terms is to first run a search in which you leave all of the field selection boxes in their default setting. Suggested subject terms will then appear after you've run a search. You can't start a search by telling a database to search for your terms in the subject field since the terms that you've entered may not actually be subject terms used by the database.
If you have any questions about this information, please use the UMGC Library's Ask a Librarian service to receive assistance.