Advanced Search Strategies
This guide is going to look at some tips, tricks and general strategies to go beyond basic searching and improve your results. We highly recommend that you try various strategies, both basic and advanced, when doing research. Any change in the search parameters you make will more than likely change your results. If you have any questions, please contact a librarian and we will be happy to help.
Using Subject Terms
In basic strategies, we focused on keywords. When we search for keywords, we are simply asking the database to find results that include the keywords we specify using the Boolean operators selected. However, this does not mean that those results are ABOUT the keywords you searched for - only that they contain them.
Subject Terms are for finding articles ABOUT a topic and this section will focus on how to best use them to drastically improve your search results. They are controlled terminology, unique to each database, often matching professional terminology.
If you are using an EBSCO, ProQuest, or Gale database, they will have the option of using subject terms. After submitting your first keyword search, you will find a list of relevant subjects within an articles record (see Image 01).
To select to see all the articles in this database about one of these subject terms, simply click on it and the database will submit a new search for only that subject term.
Image 01: Search results record in EBSCO's Academic Search Elite.
Image 02
In Image 02, you can see how the new search looks when you use a linked subject term to search. You can also enter the subject term manually by clicking the drop down and selecting the "subject" option (Image 03). Both Image 02 and Image 03 should result in the same search results (see Image 04).
Image 03
Image 04
As you can see in Image 04, whether the DE "EDUCATION" or just "education" with the dropdown selected as "SU Subject Terms" is entered, either will work in returning the same results.
⚠️ A Warning About Subject Terms
Each database has their own subject terms and they do not often transfer from database to database. This is one of the many advanced search functions that the HJF Discovery Search cannot handle and limits its functionality. Make sure to take note of subject terms and feel free to use them to start your keyword searches in other databases, but don't be surprised if the subject terms change slightly from database to database.
Citation Chaining
Citation chaining is a method of "chaining" or "linking" research articles together through their citations and works cited in each article. Doing this is a great tool for discovering more sources for your own research as well as discovering the overarching scholarly conversation taking place through time. It also emphasizes a very important point - research is built upon other research.
Image 05: Backward Citation Chaining Basic Example
Backward Chaining
Let's imagine you have a research article published in 2020. We'll refer to this article as the "original article" since it is the original article we're imagining you found. This original article has cited a number of other articles it used in its own research which can be found in a list in the bibliography, works cited or references, depending on what citation style the author used. Go to that list and start looking up each reference using the How to Find Full Text method linked here. This is backward chaining as we're moving backwards in time to find more sources.
Image 05 demonstrates this in a basic fashion. In reality, the original article would likely point at many of the 2010 articles as well.
Forward Chaining
Forward chaining is the same concept, but moving forward in time. Instead of looking at what your original article cited, you're going to look for the articles that have since cited your original article. This is more difficult to accomplish since there often isn't a list, as we get with backwards chaining.
Rest assured, there a couple of different ways to accomplish this with relative ease.
Image 06: Forward Citation Chaining Basic Example
Using Google Scholar for Forward Chaining
When you are looking at search results found in Google Scholar, you will notice a bit of information found under the result itself. The search result is usually comprised of the title which is linked to the publisher's website, a list of authors, the publication year, the main URL that the link will take you to, a couple lines of an abstract and below that, options to save the article, cite the article, Cited by, Related articles, and versions. When forward chaining, you want to look at the "Cited by" information. Click this link and you will get search results for every article Google Scholar has identified as having cited this article since its publication.
Image 07: Google Scholar's "Cited by" Example
Using scite.ai for Forward Chaining
scite.ai is a subscription service the HJF offers to all Morningside faculty, staff and students. More information on using scite.ai can be found in the scite.ai help guide. For this guide, the important thing to know is that you can take your original article, search for it in scite.ai and if it is found, see the articles that have cited it (at least the ones indexed by scite.ai) as well as see the "citation statements" for each article. Citation statements are evaluations of the way a citation used. These include supporting citation statements, mentioning citation statements and contrasting citation statements. In addition to these metrics on how a source is being used by others, you also get a clip of the citation in each article that cites it, allowing for you to see the context of the citation's use before searching for the actual article.
Image 08: scite.ai Example of a Citation Statement
Don't Choose - Use Both
You can have the best of both worlds by installing the Lean Library browser extension. This extension works with the HJF Library's subscription to scite and puts the citation statement metrics right into the Google Scholar search results. See Image 09 as an example of what this would look like.
Not familiar with Lean Library? Take a look at our Help Guide where you will also find a download link. It is free to use for Morningside faculty, staff and students by logging in using your Morningside account.
Image 09: Google Scholar Search Result with Lean Library Plugin Installed