Subject terms: Does anyone use them anymore?
Are subject terms still of any use to anyone when they are searching online resources? I know that controlled vocabulary like MESH have their place but I have found the subject terms in a discovery layer like Summon quite useless. Let's say you are searching for resources on attachment theory. If you run this search in Summon the subject terms it provides are so broad they are useless, e.g. article, psychology, social sciences, electronic books, education, studies, teaching, research. Some of them, e.g. article , are not even what you could call subject terms. The other problem is you cannot "explode" these terms to find sub topics. So there is no use in using them to refine your search - there are far better ways of doing this like using Boolean's. Subject terms in other databases can be more useful. Let's look at ABI/INFORM as an example. I ran the same search again and had a look at the subject terms offered. While non of them ...