Refining your Search with Fields

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Whether you’re searching for books in the Library Catalogue, or searching for journal articles in a database, or even searching in Google Scholar, there are often many search options... but you can get by with using just a few.

Think of these as different characteristics of an item. Like songs in iTunes, which can be found by searching by artist, album title, song title, year, or genre,... books and journal articles can be found by searching by title, author, year, subject, and other fields.

Let’s say I’m interested in the book Don Quixote. I don’t want to read the book Don Quixote, but rather stuff written about the book Don Quixote. So I’ll search for Don Qui?ote as a Subject Heading. AND similarly, I may be interested in the author Cervantes. Not in books written by Cervantes,… but rather in things written about Cervantes. AND finally... I’m interested in the topic of chivalry. I don’t know if there is a Subject Heading for this, so I’ll just leave it as a Keyword.

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