Searching is a process. You pick a topic to research, choose the right keywords, and then try your search in a library database. And then you can look at your results. But what if your results aren't what you want? There may be too many, too few, or they may not look like they're on your topic. You may need to refine your search. This tutorial will show you how to do that.
To narrow or expand your search, you will use search refining techniques. These include Keywords, Title, Date Range, Abstract, Publication Type, Author, and Subject Terms.
Let's try refining a search for the topic Leadership in Education
To narrow or expand your search, you will use search refining techniques. These include Keywords, Title, Date Range, Abstract, Publication Type, Author, and Subject Terms.
Let's try refining a search for the topic Leadership in Education
Start by going to the library website and choosing Databases A-Z.
Then pick the database you want to search.
We'll use the Academic Search Premier database.
This is the search screen. On the search screen you'll see a variety of limits. The Full Text limit only finds articles with full text. The Scholarly Journals limit finds articles from journals that are considered scholarly, peer-reviewed, juried, or refereed. The Published Date finds articles published between specific dates.
Our keywords are Leadership and education.
This is the results screen. You can see that we've found far too many results.
Do the article titles match our topic? No, not really. We don't have to start over, instead let's refine this search.
Start by modifying the keywords. Here we can use a narrower term: higher education.
We can also look for keywords in specific fields. A field is a specific location in an article record, like the article's title, the journal name, or the name of the author.
While there are many different fields, you probably use Title, Abstract, and Author the most. For this search, let's look for the keyword leadership in the title.
Now let's search for higher education in the abstract.
This is a much better result list.
Subject terms also refine a search. If you see a subject term that matches your search keywords, adding it to your search will help refine your search results.
Only 73 articles on our topic. We are done narrowing our search.
What if you have too few results? You can use the same techniques to expand your search. Let's start with a search for: the effect of violence on television shows on adolescents.
For this search we only want scholarly, peer-reviewed articles. Check the Scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals box.
We'll also limit the search to the last three years.
Now we can enter our keywords: Violence, television and adolescents.
Let's search for violence in the article titles.
Let's look for television in the abstract.
Let's look for adolescents in the abstract as well.
There's only one result. Let's expand this search.
Let's look for the keyword violence in the abstract. Just looking in the title is too narrow.
Change the keyword television to media, which will include movies and video games. And add the keyword teenagers. Adding synonyms is a quick way to expand a search.
10 results is better. But we can expand more. Go to the refine search tab to expand the search dates.
The Refine Search tab takes you back to the original search screen.
Expand the date range. Just change the beginning or ending date.
16 articles is enough for this search.
You can refine your search in other databases as well. Here are some images of the search screens of other databases.
This is a ProQuest database. You can see many of the same search limits we used before.
This is a Sage database. It also has many of the same search limits.
In this tutorial you have seen a variety of limits that can help you refine your search. We have used limits to narrow the search results, to get a shorter, and better result list. We also expanded our search results, to find more articles on the topic. We found articles from a specific date range, and limited a search to find only scholarly articles.
These limits are available on the search screen, before you search, and the results screen, when you're ready to refine what you've found.
Here is a quick list of the search limits available on the search screen and the results screen. Many limits are available on both.
Still need help? Ask a Librarian. We're here to help you refine your search and get the results you need.