Suppose your interest is ubiquitin-mediated degradation by the proteasome. If your interest is very general, you might search using terms "ubiquitin", "ubiquitin degradation" or "proteasome". A good search strategy for broad subject searching is to enter a phrase that describes your topic, but tell the system to allow ANY words to match, rather than requiring ALL words to match. (The default is ALL; but you can use the Advanced Search form to specify ANY, or instead you can click on the ANY WORDS link on your search result page to shift from ALL to ANY if your initial search didn't return the results you'd like to see.) An "Any Words" search for "ubiquitin-mediated degradation by the proteasome" gives the search result shown in the figure.

FIGURE 1

Note the hyperlinks in the top right-most column, labeled "Topics best matching my search." This is a list of the subjects that the system finds share the most words in common with your search terms. Whenever you are doing a broad subject search, it is a good idea to scan this list and see if any of the topics match your interests. If the topics shown seem promising, but not quite what you're interested in, click on the "more" link and you'll be shown more topics that potentially match your topic interest. When a topic matches your interest well, click on it and you'll be shown a list of articles in that topic.

After you click on a topic, you are looking at a page listing articles for that topic, sorted so that the articles most about that topic should be at the top of the list. However, other aspects of that page will help you narrow your results from a broad topic to a more focused set of articles if you don't find the specific articles listed to be just what you want. The next figure shows two helpful features for focusing your subject-search:

FIGURE 2

Note the list of subjects shown on the page, and see if any of the listed subjects are closer to what you are seeking. First check the "breadcrumbs" above the word Proteasomes: perhaps a "higher level" subject such as Subcellular Organelles is more appropriate to your search. Then check the lower level subjects under the word Proteasomes; perhaps "Ubiquitin-Proteasome Pathway" is more focused on your interest. If you see a better-matching topic, click on it.

Next, note the top radio button on the right of the Quick Search box. Once you've got an appropriate topic page, you can use enter keywords in the Quick Search box, and check the radio button next to your subject (in this example the button says 'In "Proteasomes"'). This will limit your keyword search to the articles in that topic. From there, you can then use the subjects listed to the right of each article to do further search refinements, as described in the previous article in this series.

Subject searching is a type of exploration - not like following a recipe or a road-map -- and it is often best to try several different approaches to gather articles that appear to be most relevant. We've tried to make this exploration easy in the HighWire portal by providing one-click hyperlinks that let you look at alternatives quickly. Let us know what you think of the tools we've provided.

The 2002 and 2003 issues of ASBMB Today covered topics about the new HighWire Portal. The articles are online at