Fields
When doing library research, the term "field" comes up from time to time. A field, in this context, is a part of a record, usually a bibliographical record, for a book or article.
Major searchable bibliographic fields for books are:
- author
- title
- publisher
- date
|
Major searchable bibliographic fields for articles are:
- author
- title
- periodical (journal/magazine/newspaper)
- date
|
| Note: the city (place of publication) is important for a bibliographic citation, but it is usually not searchable. |
Note: the volume and pages are also important for a bibliographic citation, but they are usually not searchable. |
You might think of fields in terms of a farm. A farmer plants crops in separate fields so that it is easier to harvest and otherwise take care of them. When the farmer wants some fresh corn for supper, she knows that she will find it in the corn field.
When you are doing a search in a database, the database can find your information faster when you specify by field.
Each database puts each piece of information in the same location. (It is important when creating a bibliography, works cited, or reference list, that you do the same thing.) To find items more quickly, use the information you know to locate them.
| Look for authors in the author field
Look for titles in the title field
etc. |
 |
An important field found in most databases (including SAGE) is the
subject field. The subject field may have a different name depending on the database:
| Library of Congress Subjects (to search SAGE) |
Subject (used on full record in SAGE & elsewhere) |
| Descriptors (DE) |
Major descriptors, minor descriptors |
| Identifiers (ID) (usually a subgroup) |
Topic |
| Classification Codes |
MeSH (Medline--medical subject headings) |
| Subject Terms |
Index terms |
The
abstract field is another major field that can be useful to search (when it is available). An abstract is a non-evaluative summary of a source (usually an article, but can be a book chapter, conference proceedings, or other resource).
Most databases let you know what fields are "searchable" and will give a list describing any abbreviations used (for example PY= publishing year, AB=abstract, etc.). Look under "Help" for field abbreviations, fields, or a similar term.
Specifically in SAGE
When you do a TITLE search in SAGE, you are essentially telling the database to search for the words you've typed in the title field--only. SAGE then lists all of the titles alphabetically. If you are missing words near the beginning of the title or are missing or using different punctuation than the title in SAGE, you might not find the item you seek.
- For example, All Quiet on the Western Front does not appear alphabetically near All is Quiet on the Western Front. Thus, if you are doing a title search, make sure you know the exact title. (If you are not sure of the exact title, do a KEYWORD search instead.)
When you do an AUTHOR search, the database looks for the name (personal or corporate) in the author field.
It works the same for Journal & Newspaper Titles,
Library of Congress Subject, call numbers, and other numbers searches.
KEYWORD searches in SAGE
When you do a KEYWORD search, the computer searches more than one field; it looks for the word or words in the author, title, and subject fields. It is doing a "keyword" search. This is why you sometimes get "weird" results when you do a WORDS search.
For example, a KEYWORD search for "Carnegie Hall" brings up over 44 records, but most of them are not about the building and its history at all. One example,
The Only EKG Book You'll Ever Need jumps out as being off topic. The record appears because in the Contents, there is a chapter entitled How do you get to Carnegie Hall? A later page has
Fossil Vertebrates from Western North America and Mexico; Carnegie Institution published the research and E.R. Hall wrote a chapter in the item.
Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision: November 5-8, 1984, Cambridge, Massachusetts is another puzzle, but looking at the full record reveals that cooperating organizations of the conference include Carnegie-Mellon University, and that Ernest L. Hall is one of the chairmen/editors.
Thus both "Carnegie" and "hall" appear in the record, so the database did fulfill the search request. A look at one of the relevant titles, reveals that there is a subject heading for Carnegie Hall:
A search by subject finds three relevant titles, a much more productive search.
Nonetheless, if you don't know what the "correct" subject heading is, it does not hurt to try a KEYWORD search first. Additionally, if you don't have an exact title for an item, the KEYWORD search is useful, particularly when it has keywords that are not used frequently. A title with "history" or "United States" is going to find a lot of records. Using as many clues as possible; you can
limit by year (date), type of material, language, location, and words in the title, author, or subject field. In SAGE you can also "guess" a Library of Congress Subject, and if you are close, the library catalog will let you know what the preferred term is:
In this instance, a (Library of Congress) Subject search for "cooking" shows that the database uses "cookery" instead.
Most databases do not provide the preferred term in this format. You must identify the terms in a printed or electronic thesaurus or in the
subject/descriptor field of relevant records located by a generic word search.
See
Using Preferred Terms in Indexes
Back to
Truncation and Proximity Operators
Searching SAGE on the Web
