Combining searches is useful when you want to link together references from two or more different field searches. You may wish to know what an author has written on one particular topic amongst many- in this case you will want to combine an author and a subject search. Alternatively, you may have an incomplete reference with one reliable title keyword and an author. In this case you will want to do an author and title combined search.

Activity

You have been asked to find an article by Kerr on 'creep'. A very vague reference. Using Compendex, run an author search on Kerr* and then do another  search on creep. Lastly, combine the two searches.

Comment

General points

Combined searching is very useful when you have a couple of general terms like Kerr as author and creep as title, descriptor or abstract word. There are so many occurrences of  "Kerr" and "creep" in a typical journal article database, you cannot search on these terms on their own unless you are willing to search through many irrelevant articles. Much better to link the two terms together across different fields to give a useful, specific result.

Next, a look at an alternative way of searching bibliographic databases, using citation searching.