Research Guides: TEC 449S/649S: The Trinity: A Historical and Theological Survey: Getting Started

Types of Information

Popular vs Scholarly
Keywords vs Subject Headings

Popular and Scholarly Information Sources

The table below shows characteristics commonly associated with scholarly or popular sources.

Both scholarly and popular sources can be appropriate for your research purposes, depending on your research question and expectations for your assignment by your professor.

	Popular	Scholarly
Types	Magazines Newspapers Websites Trade Publications	Scholarly journals Academic books Dissertations/theses
Availability	Readily available to the public OR Available behind a paywall	Available through libraries and online databases Usually behind a paywall
Authorship	Journalists Freelance writers	Researchers Scholars with subject expertise
Purpose/Audience	Inform, entertain, persuade general public	Share original research with other researchers/scholars Expand knowledge in discipline Written using using vocabulary and language from the discipline
Sources/Documentation	No formal citations or sources cited indirectly	All sources cited Extensive reference lists or bibliographies
Editorial Process	Reviewed by single editor	Blind peer-review by multiple experts or refereed by scholars in the same field
Structure	Mix of short and in-depth articles on wide variety of subjects	Lengthy articles with subsections within articles (literature review, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion)
Publisher	Popular presses; or unknown.	Academic or scholarly presses
Timeframe	Current events are well covered. Material can be published on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis.	The writing, editorial and publication process takes a long time. Coverage of current events lag by about one or two years.

What’s the difference?

Keyword Searching: you can use any words or phrase, and results will include these words somewhere in the record (the title, table of contents, summary, etc.)

Keywords use natural language.
Different people (including authors) use different words to describe the same topic Keywords are not controlled.
Keyword searches typically search an entire database record, including full-text articles.
Use quotation marks to search a specific term.

Subject Searching: these are authorized search terms, and the catalog only searches the subject field of each record.

All cataloged and indexed materials have assigned headings called “subjects”
Subject headings describe the “aboutness” or topic of the work, bring together all of the works on the same topic, despite differences in text.
Subject headings are “controlled”- they are carefully selected from existing lists called “controlled vocabularies”
Subject searches only search within the assigned subject field within a database record

Brainstorming keywords for your research question

Your search process for information resources will invariably use a combination of both strategies.

Database Search Terms

The following are some useful Library of Congress subject headings:

Church history

Creeds

Creeds—Ecumenical

History of Doctrines

History of doctrines concerning the Holy Spirit

Holy Spirit. The Paraclete

Incarnation

Jesus Christ -- Divinity

Nicene Creed

Theology—Doctrinal History

Theology—Doctrinal History—Early Church

Theology—Early Church

Theology—History

Trinity

Trinity in Art

Trinity in Literature

Use chronological subdivisions to help locate material from a particular period.

Theology History

--Early Church

--Middle Ages

--Modern Period

Bible--Commentaries

--Early works through 1800

--1801-1950

--1951-2000

--2001-

You can also narrow your search by adding a keyword like a person or theological concept, (e.g., Doctrinal Theology AND Augustine) or (e.g. Trinity AND Holy Spirit)