LexisNexis and a Citation Pearl Growing Search

For the Citation Pearl Growing search I started by entering the terms "teen library use" into the search box in LexisNexis. I am interested in finding statistics on how many teens use public libraries in the United States.

I was pleasantly surprised to retrieve 999 hits.

I chose to view one article titled "Libraries tune into teens." At the bottom of the page of the article, subjects are listed. One of them is public libraries so I decided to conduct the search again using teen public library use as the search terms.

This narrowed the search to 961 hits.

I noticed United States was a subject heading for some of the hits so I added it to my search resulting in 625 hits.

One of the hits had "statistics" listed as a subject so I added it to my final search to find 16 articles, all of which are not relevant. At least I was able to handle browsing 16 hits rather than the last 625 hits. I found one of the 16 particularly interesting...Libraries shelve old ways.

The Citation Pearl Growing Search worked well in LexisNexis. This is particularly useful if you do not know the best terms to search since it is possible to look at articles to find subject headings. LexisNexis uses a controlled vocabulary; therefore, the type of search used here is perfect for this database. My search terms were not terrible complex, but the citation pearl growing search should be used in cases where the user is not sure of the technical language. The technique used in this type of search could be applied to other types of searching when subject headings are presented in the results.