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Search Strategy

Search Topic: I am interested in finding out more about contaminants in American big city water suppliers.

Based on the search above, do the options below use search strategies correctly?  Could they be improved?

Search A:

“big city” AND water

Search B:

contaminant OR "human activity"

Search C:

contaminant OR pollutant OR toxin

AND

"water quality"

Search D:

"san francisco" OR "los angeles" OR "new york"

AND

pollution*

AND

health

Keywords vs. Subjects

keywords vs subjects chart. Keywords: use natural language (words describing your topic -- good to start with). Subjects: use pre-defined "controlled vocabulary" words used to describe the content of each item (book, journal article, etc) in a database. Keywords: more flexible -- can combine together in many ways, Subjects: less flexible to search by -- need to know the exact controlled vocabulary term. Keywrds: database looks for keywords anywhere in the record -- not nec connected together, Subject Terms: database looks for subjects ONLY in the subjects heading or descriptor field, where the most relevant words appear. Keywords: may yield too many or too few results -- omit or add keywords, Subject terms: if too many results, can use subheading to focus on one aspect of the broader subject. Keywords: may yield many irrelevant items, Subject terms: results are usually very relevant to the topic.