Subject Search Tips

When to search by subject:

You can use a subject search to advantage when you know the topic of interest, but are not familiar with authors or titles of documents about that topic.

Tips on searching by subject:

Single keywords

Find documents containing a single term in any field (i.e., author, title, subject, journal) of the citation.  Examples:

diffusion
biotechnology

Keyword phrases

Find documents containing a specified phrase in any field by surrounding it with quotation marks.  Examples:

"ethical issues"
"desktop publishing"
"farm journals"

Cross-subject searching

Remember that every document in this collection involves communications related to agriculture, so contains elements of both broad subject areas.  Therefore, cross-subject searches may be highly useful to you.

If you are uncertain about what subject terms to use, check the thesaurus.