Most periodical indexes organize their records using a list of approved subject headings. This allows you to find all the articles about your topic under one term. This is referred to as controlled vocabulary. You will want to be careful when you are searching more than one index, as they may not use the same terms. When you are searching more than one index, as you can with both EBSCO Databases and Research Library through Proquest, you may want to use key terms.

How do you find the controlled vocabuluary? Some indexes provide a list of subject headings. This list is called a subject guide or a thesaurus. If you search for a word that is not in the index, it may suggest an approved subject heading you could use.

In this example, there are 1,712 articles about the Internet in this database. If you looked for articles using the words Information Superhighway, this database would direct you to use the subject heading Internet.