Some databases have a thesaurus with preferred terms called subject terms. Sometimes you can get a better search result if you use subject terms than keywords of your choice. A search using subject terms is called a subject search, whereas a search using keywords of your choice is called a keyword search. See the following videos for more information:
If you are studying literature, you may also want to watch the following video:
The following three thesauri consist of English subject terms: the MLA Thesaurus in the MLA International Bibliography, the Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts Thesaurus in the Linguistics Collection, and the ERIC Thesaurus in the Education Collection. Although the subject terms are in English, they can be used to retrieve literature in other languages.
Exercises
Exercise 1: Construct a search in the MLA International Bibliography for finding literature on Japanese verbs of causation. Use the MLA Thesaurus if possible. When you have completed the exercise, you can click here to see how to construct the search.
Exercise 2: Construct a search in the MLA International Bibliography for finding literature on food shortage in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Use the MLA Thesaurus if possible. When you have completed the exercise, you can click here to see how to construct the search.
If it is not possible to do a subject search or if you get too few results, you can try to do a keyword search by searching on the following:
Synonyms (e.g. old people / elderly / senior citizens)
Narrower terms (e.g. working class, lower class, middle class and upper class are narrower terms than social class)
Words with alternative spelling (e.g. theatre / theater ; loanwords / loan words)
Variants (e.g. Canadian schools / Canada's schools / schools in Canada)
Sometimes it can be good to search on words with the same meaning in different languages. For example, if you are studying French, you could try searching on both French and English terms.
Sometimes it can also be good to search on related terms (e.g. "slaves" is related to "slavery" and "women's rights" is related to "feminism")
Suppose you want to find literature on puns in advertisements. The search could then for example look like this:
(puns OR paronomasia OR wordplay OR "word play" OR "play on words") AND (advertisements OR commercials)