COMM 124 - Denja

• In many traditional academic databases, all items are examined by human indexers, who assign subject terms to each item that characterize the content of the item. The subject terms come from a disciplinary thesaurus developed by each database producer.
• Your search strategy--
  In traditional academic databases, seek out the subject headings that are used in the database that are synonymous with the topics you are investigating. How?

Example:

Articulate the subject you want to investigate:

Is academic performance impacted for commuter students?

Identify the words/phrases that constitute the main topics:

Is academic performance impacted for commuter students?

Start searching using your own vocabulary for your topics

Review some of the full records on the result list and look for subject terms used in ProQuest PowerSearch that are synonymous with your search terms 

Redo your search combining your terms and all the database subject terms you found:

"academic performance" or "academic achievement" or "grade point average"

AND

"commuter students" or "commuting students"