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The sample comprises eight PhD students in several humanities disciplines at Linnaeus University, a medium-sized Swedish university from 2020.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Findings<\/jats:title><jats:p>Most humanities PhD students in the study have received training in information searching, but it has been too basic. Most rely on web search engines like Google and Google Scholar for publications' search, and university's discovery system for known-item searching. As these systems do not rely on controlled vocabularies, the participants often struggle with too many retrieved documents that are not relevant. Most only rarely or never use disciplinary bibliographic databases. The controlled search task has shown some benefits of using controlled vocabularies in the disciplinary databases, but incomplete synonym or concept coverage as well as user unfriendly search interface present hindrances.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Originality\/value<\/jats:title><jats:p>The paper illuminates an often-forgotten but pervasive challenge of subject searching, especially for humanities researchers. It demonstrates difficulties and shows how most PhD students have missed finding an important resource in their research. It calls for the need to reconsider training in information searching and the need to make use of controlled vocabularies implemented in various search systems with usable search and browse user interfaces.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.1108\/jd-03-2023-0044","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,10,31]],"date-time":"2023-10-31T07:21:55Z","timestamp":1698736915000},"page":"308-329","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Online subject searching of\u00a0humanities PhD students at a Swedish university"],"prefix":"10.1108","volume":"79","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-4169-4777","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Koraljka","family":"Golub","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Xu","family":"Tan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6504-4598","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ying-Hsang","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Jukka","family":"Tyrkk\u00f6","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"140","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,10,30]]},"reference":[{"first-page":"45","volume-title":"Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. 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