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Exploring
New Frontiers: Using Subject Searching |
For over a year
now, The Physiologist has brought you brief descriptions and
highlights of the features and tools offered by the portal site from
Stanford’s HighWire Library of the Sciences and Medicine, which allows
you to search all of Medline plus 350 journals’ full text at once,
including all of the APS research journals. We invite you to explore
the site and try the features we have provided. The site is at
http://highwire.stanford.edu.
When you encounter a new subject and want to see what
literature resources cover that topic, typical keyword-search systems
let you down. They might give you thousands of items that mention the
keywords you use to name the topic but no sense of which articles are
fundamentally about the topic and what other topics are related to
your chosen topic. The HighWire portal’s subject searching feature
does this for you automatically. Every time you do a keyword search,
the keywords you give are checked against the 28,000 topics in the
HighWire “taxonomy” and against nearly 100,000 phrases that denote
those topics. Whenever a match is found between your keywords and
HighWire’s topics and phrases, the half-dozen best matching topics are
shown to you. And with a click you can see more matching topics.
Suppose your interest is ubiquitin-mediated degradation
by the proteasome. If your interest is very general, you might search
using terms “ubiquitin,” “ubiquitin degradation,” or “proteasome.” A
good search strategy for broad subject searching is to enter a phrase
that describes your topic but tell the system to allow ANY words to
match, rather than requiring ALL words to match. (The default is ALL
but you can use the Advanced Search form to specify ANY or, instead,
you can click on the ANY WORDS link on your search result page to
shift from ALL to ANY if your initial search didn’t return the results
you would like to see.) An “Any Words” search for “ubiquitin-mediated
degradation by the proteasome” gives the search result shown in Figure
1.
Note the hyperlinks in the top rightmost column,
labeled “Topics best matching my search.” This is a list of the
subjects that the system finds share the most words in common with
your search terms. Whenever you are doing a broad subject search, it
is a good idea to scan this list and see if any of the topics match
your interests. If the topics shown seem promising, but not quite what
you’re interested in, click on the “more” link, and you’ll be shown
more topics that potentially match your topic interest. When a topic
matches your interest well, click on it, and you’ll be shown a list of
articles on that topic.
After you click on a topic, you are looking at a page
listing articles for that topic, sorted so that the articles most
applicable to that topic should be at the top of the list. However,
other aspects of that page will help you narrow your results from a
broad topic to a more focused set of articles, if you don’t find the
specific articles listed to be just what you want. Figure 2 shows two
helpful features for focusing your subject-search.
Note the list of subjects shown on the page and see if
any of the listed subjects are closer to what you are seeking. First
check the “breadcrumbs” above the word Proteasomes: perhaps a “higher
level” subject, such as Subcellular Organelles, is more appropriate to
your search. Then check the lower level subjects under the word
Proteasomes; perhaps “Ubiquitin-Proteasome Pathway” is more focused on
your interest. If you see a better matching topic, click on it.
Next, note the top radio button on the right of the
Quick Search box. Once you’ve got an appropriate topic page, you can
enter keywords in the Quick Search box and check the radio button next
to your subject (in this example, the button says ‘In “Proteasomes”).
This will limit your keyword search to the articles in that topic.
From there, you can then use the subjects listed to the right of each
article to do further search refinements, as described in the previous
article in this series (The Physiologist, April 2004).
Subject searching is a type of exploration—not like
following a recipe or a road-map—and it is often best to try several
different approaches to gather articles that appear to be most
relevant. We’ve tried to make this exploration easy in the HighWire
portal by providing one-click hyperlinks that let you look at
alternatives quickly. Let us know what you think of the tools we’ve
provided. |
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