Refining Your Search

If you’re not happy with your search results, here are a few suggestions for how to refine your search:

Too many results? You need to focus the topic more. One way to do this is to add more search terms. You can also look to see if the database provides a way to add “Limits” to your results – most of our databases allow you to do some basic limiting (e.g., to specific dates, to scholarly journals, to articles with the complete text, or to certain types of articles, such as book reviews or editorials), while some of our other databases, such as our psychology databases, will allow you to limit even further, to specific populations, study types, and age groups.

Not enough results? You need to broaden the topic.

If you find an article or two that DO look good, look at the subject headings that have been assigned to that article – these are the official words that the database has used to describe the ideas in the article (and other articles like it), so try a search using some appropriate subject headings as search terms.

Most of our databases provide an Advanced search page – on this page you can be very specific about where you want your search terms to appear. For example, you can indicate exactly which publication you want to search in and what words you want to appear in the title of the article. You can also tell the database to search for your terms just in the subject headings field.

You will see these same (or similar) databases at other college libraries, as well as public libraries. They will have many of the same features you've just learned about here. To learn more about a specific database, look for a link to their Help screen.