Week Seven: Search Strategies [Michelina Tersigni, W14]

"Subject", to me, is a sub-heading of "topic" — I used to conflate the two as the exact same thing, but within the context of journal and library databases, there seems to be more nuance. It's like, if you're researching "fire", simply entering the word as just that within the search bar is going to get you broad and varied results. Focusing more tightly on, say, "household fires" or "fire accidents" or "arson" or "firefighters" is what snaps it down into "subject" — the official area of study, the lens most intensely peered at and unpacked. For my podcast, I had to do the same and tighten my topic of "women" into "Western women", which still isn't the most specific I or anyone could go, but still lets my audience know that I don't mean women universally, because there are different cultural connotations to pay mind to.

Official subjects can be made even tighter through Boolean logic — using "and"/"or"/"not" between keywords, e.g. "household fires and firefighters", meaning I want information that links the two together (most likely articles on firefighters calming household fires); "household fires or fire accidents", meaning that I see a connection between the two, that the two are synonymous (most likely articles on how most household fires are accidents); "household fires not arson", meaning that in this case, I'm looking for just one, not both (again, most likely fire that is accidental, not the deliberate burning of a home).

I think library databases are more immediately productive than Google Scholar, because I can easily access all of this information, whereas Google Scholar gives me more of a tease of sources that I may or may not always have access to. However, I can combine Google Scholar putting me on the right track by using its nudges to (hopefully) find alternate and/or equally full versions in a database via YorkU. Either way, wherever I'm searching, "subjects" and the Boolean breakdowns you can do within them are highly useful; before, I'd operated on the belief that you can just put in a broad keyword and you'll get what you want eventually, when all this time all I had to do was add one more word to not only get what I really wanted, but get it faster.