Controlled vocabulary
Controlled vocabulary legislate the use of predefined, authorized terms that have been preselected by the designer of the vocabulary, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, where there is no restriction on the vocabulary. In the library world we call this "metadata," or data about the data. For example, you are familiar with the term "sex appeal," but that term doesn't sound very scientific or objective. Let's see what subject headings or descriptors the scholars at APA have chosen to describe what we commonly call "sex appeal."
Subject headings
Subject headings are a controlled vocabulary. A single term or phrase is determined by an authority (Library Congress or a database vendor) to describe a subject. For example, try searching for the subject "roaring twenties" in West-Cat and see what you get. Subject headings are also referred to as descriptors or metadata.
PsychInfo List of Searchable Fields |
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AA Author affiliation |
KW Key concepts |
The thesaurus uses vocabulary and subjects to define topics. The thesaurus also lets you filter results in terms of browser or narrower terms like described below. For more detailed information see the tutorials below.
Subject headings
Subject headings are a controlled vocabulary. A single term or phrase is determined by an authority (Library Congress or a database vendor) to describe a subject. For example, try searching for the subject "roaring twenties" in West-Cat and see what you get. Subject headings are also referred to as descriptors or metadata.
Explode
When you Explode a term, you create a search query that “explodes” the subject heading. The headings are exploded to retrieve all references indexed to that term as well as all references indexed to any narrower subject terms.
In a database with a tree, such as MeSH or CINAHL Headings, exploding retrieves all documents containing any of the subject terms below the term you selected. In other databases, exploding retrieves all documents containing the selected term, as well as any of its first level of narrower terms. If a plus sign (+) appears next to a narrower or related term, there are narrower terms below it. (EBSCO)
Major Concept
When you select Major Concept for a term, you create a search query that finds only records for which the subject heading is a major point of the article. Searches are limited with specific qualifiers (subheadings) to improve the precision of the search, and limited to major subject headings indicate the main concept of an article. Subject headings which describe the major focus of a document are preceded by an asterisk (*) in the PsycARTICLES record.
Combining Explode and Major Concept
If you select both Explode and Major Concept, you retrieve all references indexed to your term (and its narrower terms) and all articles for which the subject heading is a major point of the article.