Keywords search:
- for occurrences of a word in online text, but will not look for SUBJECTS.
- through all text in an online document (title, author, table of contents, etc.), but often keyword searches can be limited to occurrences of a word in individual fields (e.g.: words in a title only).
PROS with Keywords, you can:
- make up your own terms
- enter topics, artists’ names, titles of books or articles, a publishers’ name, dates
- join more than one together with Booleans
CONS Keyword searches do not:
- look up topics, so you often get false results in your searches
- work for common names or common phrases; for example a keyword search in the library catalogue on art history will retrieve every book with the work “art” and the word “history” in in title, subject, or contents notes. So this search will retrieve almost every book in the library collection!