About Thesaurus
How to Use the Education Thesaurus
The Education Thesaurus is a subject search and retrieval tool used by researchers to find a document or a number of documents dealing with the same subject or related subjects. While other search tools available in the Shamaa database can facilitate accessing a document by way of the title or a keyword in the title or the name of the author, they are incapable of aiding the researcher in finding all that he needs to access. The Thesaurus not only provides access to the requested information but also indicates to the researcher, due to its hierarchical structure, the various inter-related subjects, whether broader and more general in scope, or narrower and more restricted.
When searching, for example, for “فعالية المعلمين” (fa`āliyat al-mu`allimin, teacher effectiveness) the researcher will find the following:
فعالية المعلمين
Teacher effectiveness
Rendement de l’enseignement
س ل فاعلية المعلمين
م ع جودة التعليم
م ت التحصيل الدراسي
The record for this descriptor displays the following items
Below the descriptor are the English and French equivalent descriptors which allow the researcher to search for documents in these two languages should he so wish. The entry indicated by “س ل” (UF, used for) refers the person searching under the term “فاعلية المعلمين” (a non-descriptor) to the preferred descriptor adopted in the Thesaurus. To put it more clearly, whoever searches under “فاعلية المعلمين” (fā`iliyat al-mu`allimin) will find the following:
(in italics for all non-descriptors) فاعلية المعلمين
س فعالية المعلمين
The Thesaurus employs the following symbols
م ر indicates مصطلح رئيسي,Main Term (MT). This displays the number of the facet or subject followed by the linguistic designation. The number is the key to accessing all the related descriptors, and represents a branch in the overall knowledge tree.
ت indicates تبصرة, Scope Note (SN). This is an explanation or specification of meaning or scope of the descriptor, used especially when the descriptor is ambiguous or ambivalent.
س indicates إستخدم, Use (USE). (The non-descriptor is always displayed in italics. The non-descriptor is a synonymous term which is less common and not as widely used in educational literature).
م ع indicates مصطلح أعم, Broad Term (BT).
م ض indicates مصطلح أضيق, Narrower Term (NT).
م ت indicates مصطلح مرتبط, Related Term (RT).