Help --- What are descriptors?

[Donna Esposito]

My daughter is in college and is a Nutrition/Health Sciences major. She has to complete a Nutrition Research assignment. The librarian at her college reviewed Nutrition Databases with her class. One of the questions on the assignment is to use the Nutrition Abstracts and Reviews and find a particular article - give the bibliographic citation and also the "descriptors" for the article. She is turning to her mom the librarian for some guidance. I'm not sure what descriptors are (I must have missed that day in library school) Are descriptors the same as subjects or keywords?

The timing for her question is really perfect for me as a high school librarian. I am teaching a research assignment tomorrow. I am always looking for additional reason why we want the students to use databases (instead of the instant gratification of just using Google). I plan on showing this assignment to my students to show them what to expect when they go off to college.

Thanks in advance for your help on descriptors.

[Joyce Valenza]

Donna,
They are simply subject heading terms assigned by the database, terms that would be included in its thesaurus of terms. In some databases, they appear in the left frame and often show the structure of the database by including narrower and broader terms. In EBSCO, which may be the vendor your daughter uses, the descriptors appear and are searched in capitol letters. When you do a field search, descriptors are often searched by field tags like DE or SU.

Hope this helps!

joyce

[Donna Esposito]

Thanks Joyce.

I've used EBSCO many times (and even looked in EBSCO before I asked for help) and never noticed the DE tag. I just tried it again and now I see it. Thanks for your help, I will pass it along to my daughter.

Donna