| Controlled Vocabulary | Natural Language (Keyword) | |
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| Description: | Databases that provide a list of subject terms in the form of thesauri, subject headings or taxonomies. Subjects are added to each record by staff using a predefined list of terms. | Natural Language databases allow searching by any words selected by the user. |
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| Best practice for using: |
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Structure the search strategy carefully to maximise results.
Using Boolean operators can be very important to get the most appropriate results. It is important to check the database help pages to find out the way these operators work within different databases.
Think carefully about how the search terms are related to work out when OR or NOT can be applied most effectively.
Phrase searching should be used where there are obvious terms that belong together. However consider also whether terms would always be put together and whether a phrase may restrict the search too much. Sometimes using proximity operators will work better when words may appear close to each other.
Truncation and Wildcards finds different endings or spellings of words.
See more about developing your search strategy
Field searching helps narrow the results to only results appearing in the most useful fields.
Most of the time relevant resources will mention the key concepts in the abstract. Sometimes it will be mentioned in the title but not always.
The subject field can also be useful in databases which use a thesaurus or subject headings, such as Medline, ERIC or PsycInfo. This way it is possible to search for terms in the subject heading and not need to know the exact term.
Finding review articles on similar topics will also be useful to find more relevant authors and papers
Many databases provide limits to restrict results to 'reviews' using limiters such as publication type or document type. Check the Advanced Search screen for limiting options.
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