Theological Research and Writing: Information Retrieval

Information retrieval is a skill used to communicate with IR systems like databases, library catalogs, and the internet.  Your first IR system was probably an index in the back of a book.  You go to the index with an idea in mind and a word which represents that idea.  If that idea has been indexed using that word, you will find what you are looking for.  Often, however, the word you had in mind does not appear in the index, although you are quite certain that the idea is in the book.  So, you think of a synonym or a related word and you go search for that.  When you deal with an online catalog, an electronic database, or Google, you are dealing with an information retrieval system.

We are spoiled by internet search engines, but not everything with a search box works like Google.  Google searches all of the information on a page.  Library catalogs only search a representation of that information.  A bibliographic record is a representation of a book, but it is not the book itself.  Learning a bit about how information is represented in a database can go a long way to helping you find what you are looking for.

 Take a look at this bib record from the library catalog:

Not every bibliographic record is created equal!  Some have summaries that will make them easier to find, but some records were created before those elements began to be added to bibliographic records.

Subject terms in bibliographic and database records are a controlled vocabulary.  A controlled vocabulary is a system of words in which an idea is represented by one word.  So, the house pets commonly referred to as “cats” might be represented instead by “felines.”  If the word selected for that creature is “felines," you will use that word to find everything about cats.

  Look at the “Explore” area in the bib record for “And He had Compassion.” 

There is one subject term for this book.  A book can, and in most cases should, have more than one subject term.  A subject term is like a file folder, and every item it describes can be found in that file folder.

This term, JESUS CHRIST—MIRACLES is a compound term, meaning that JESUS CHRIST is one subject and MIRACLES is another.  MIRACLES modifies JESUS CHRIST such that the subject term refers to the MIRACLES of JESUS CHRIST.

           A subject search for MIRACLES—JESUS CHRIST will always retrieve 39 results, that is, until more are added.  The only problem is that you probably won’t know the correct subject term to use.  You can look at subject terms by searching through the subject term index, or by doing a keyword search and taking the term from one of the records that you retrieve.

Your ability to retrieve the information you need is dependent upon your own knowledge of your topic.  The more you read about your topic, the better you will be able to search.  

A student once struggled to find enough books on the Kings of Israel and Judah to sufficiently meet the assignment requirements for his paper on the topic.  It turns out that he was looking specifically for books about the Kings of Israel and Judah using keywords and subject terms related to "Kings of Israel."  When he began to search for books containing information such as commentaries on the Biblical books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, he had more than enough sources.

Even if you are able to find many items with IR skills, you will still have to do more work to evaluate them than if you use bibliographies or citations in other books.

Combine bibliography and information retrieval skills and you will be sure to find plenty of sources!

Use information that you have gleaned from investigating your topic to form intelligent searches.  Think of it as a word bank from which you can draw words to plug in to various information retrieval systems.  

You can break your topic down into several facets and put your searchable vocabulary in a table.  You start with keywords from your investigation and, as you search various databases you will add new kinds of terms, such as Library of Congress subject headings or subject headings from a particular database.  Here is a searchable vocabulary for the research question:

“What is Jesus’ attitude toward gentiles according to the gospels?”

This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list, but demonstrates how to table one’s search terms.  While conducting research you will tend to use terms over and over again in different combinations in order to be sure that you’ve found the most relevant resources and you will discover new terms as you go along.  You might consider adding a row for related terms, as shown.

It helps to learn how to use the advanced search features of the Library Catalog or databases, especially the boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT.

            Boolean operators explained:

AND: Separating two or more search terms by AND will ensure that only documents that contain all of the terms will be retrieved.  If you use AND you will get fewer results.

OR: Separating two or more search terms with OR will ensure that all of the documents containing at least one term will be included, which means that you will retrieve more documents.

NOT: Separating two terms with NOT will return every document containing the first term, while excluding all of the documents that contain both the first term and the second.  Adding additional “NOT” terms will remove documents containing those terms.

            Let’s use the following topic for a visual representation:

The deity of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John

1.  Every document about Jesus.

2. Every document about the Gospel of John.

3. Every document about deity.

4. Documents retrieved with the search: “John AND Jesus.”

5.Documents retrieved with the search: “John AND Deity.”

6. Documents retrieved with the search: “Jesus AND Deity.”

7. Documents retrieved with the search: “Jesus AND Deity AND John.”

In order to research the topic we want to find documents in area 7 because we want to get articles that discuss the deity of Christ in the Gospel of John.

For the sake of demonstration:

1 + 2 = “Jesus OR John”

1 + 2 + 3 = “Jesus OR John OR Deity”

            Using three EBSCO subject terms from the above vocabulary table, one from each facet, you’ll retrieve a manageable set of relevant hits.  23 Results!

   Look at this article I found, it looks very promising!  Note the subject headings.

            You can add OR statements in the last search box in order to retrieve articles on each of the four gospels.  Each search box acts kind of like a set of parentheses in math.  

The search engine interprets the statement like so: 

Articles with subject term "Jesus Christ" AND Articles with subject term "Gentiles in the New Testament" AND Articles with subject terms for each of the four gospels.

Take a look at the same bibliographic record in another library’s catalog.  Though online catalogs display records differently, they often use the same bibliographic record with only a few minor differences.

          The following links point to subject searches and yield more specific results than keyword searches.

Here are a few examples of EBSCO searches for several research questions.  Note the various combinations of search terms.  Do you see how each term reflects a facet of the research question?