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Searching WebPALS Library Catalog by Subject and Keyword

It is common for college students to write research papers on topics they know little about. After all, the point of doing research is to learn new things about the world. Because the topic is new to a student, she/he will not know the major authors or the major books published in the field. As a result the student researcher will need to search for information by subject. Searching by subject may seem like a straightforward idea, but as we discussed in the Defining Your Research Topic Lesson, when searching for information by subject it is often difficult to define the topic adequately. Here is an example of what I mean.

Let's say that we want to write a research paper on the negative aspects of using genetic engineering to grow food crops. If we want to locate books on this topic in PALS we can approach the search in a number of ways.

1. If we choose to do a subject search in the PALS Library Catalog we must decide which type of subject search we want to perform: a Subject Heading Keyword, or an Exact Subject Heading search. If we choose the Exact Subject Heading option we must know the exact Library of Congress subject headings related to this topic.
2. We can also choose to do a general Keyword search, but remember, keyword searching does not search for the words in context. As a result we may locate information that is irrelevant to our topic.
3. No matter which approach we choose, searching for information that specifically argues against genetic engineering may be problematic. The difficulty lies in getting the database to retrieve information that only argues against genetic engineering. There is no subject heading specifically dedicated to information arguing against a topic--for example the Library of Congress Subject Headings have no heading for "Genetic engineering--food production--negative aspects." Keyword searching is no more helpful because most books do not contain words in the title or note fields that indicate a negative evaluation of a subject.

So what do we do? There are a few ways that we can approach the topic. We can do a keyword search using the keywords: genetic, engineering, food, ethic#. The # sign is a truncation symbol, it tells PALS to look for variations of the root word ethic, i.e., ethics, and ethical (see the Boolean Operators and Truncation lesson for more information).

We get the following results:

Item numbers 0001 and 0002 look promising, although notice that nowhere in the titles is it evident that the books discuss the negative aspects of the genetic engineering of food. To find out more about the books we must look at the records. Let's take a look at item number 0002.

When we look at this record we can determine quite a lot about the book. The record does not explicitly tell us that the book argues against the genetic engineering of food; however, the book chapter title seems to indicate that the book takes a critical approach (the "Content-Note" field displays the chapter titles). Notice that the book has an appendix devoted to facts about Mad Cow disease. The title also displays a certain editorial bias that leads us to assume that the book will argue against genetic engineering. Also, in the title and in the subject headings we see the word "Bioethics," this might be another way to search for the concept "genetic engineering." Look at the first subject heading, notice that the second part of the subject heading is "Moral and ethical aspects." This is a sub-heading and is used by the Library of Congress to refine a main subject heading. We may want to start a new search and choose to do a Subject Heading Keyword search on "bioethics moral and ethical aspects." Another approach would be to redo the current search looking in all the PALS member libraries

PALS is a library consortium comprised of over 80 member libraries. To search all the PALS libraries click on the down arrow in the "where" box. When we do this a dialog box pops-up with a list of all the PALS member libraries. Use the scroll feature and go to the top of the list and choose the "all PALS libraries" option. Then resubmit the search.

We get the following results:

The first three items are the ones we own at MCTC, number 0004 and 0005 are at other PALS libraries. Number 0005 looks like it may be promising. Let's take a look.

If we look at the "Contents-Note" more closely we will find that at least one chapter of the book may be helpful.

Notice that the subject heading is quite technical. The average person would not think to search for items on this topic using the subject heading: "Transgenic organisms--Risk assessment." But this subject heading is actually quite good for our topic.

This book is located at North Dakota State University (see the "Location" field). If we want to get this book we press the button at the bottom of the record and fill in our library barcode number and password.

The book will be sent to the MCTC library and we will call you when it arrives (ILL requests usually take 5 days to 2 weeks to receive).

We could try a few other approaches to locate books on this topic. One idea would be to see if the library had subject encyclopedias that might cover this topic. For example, the library might have subject encyclopedias on bioethics, biomedical ethics, applied ethics, or the environment. You may wonder why we suggest looking for encyclopedias on biomedical or applied ethics for the topic "genetic engineering and food production." Well, the answer is that issues related to genetic engineering and food production are the very types of topics that the editors of biomedical or applied ethics encyclopedias would consider relevant. To use an encyclopedia to locate information we must be able to translate our narrow topic into broader categories. Genetic engineering is a hot ethical issue that philosophers, ethicists and doctors discuss all the time.

We will return to this topic in the Encyclopedia Lesson. We have covered the basic elements of author, title, keyword and subject searching. PALS also allows us to perform much more complex searches. Go to the Boolean Operators and Truncation Searching Lesson to learn more about doing complex searching in PALS.