Once your have identified your keywords, you can start building your search. You can do this by utilizing the three search boxes on the database main page. Putting one topic into each box helps you organize your search terms. The three boxes are linked with the AND connector.
In the example below, this would mean that your search will include resources that include the words heart attack AND exercise AND elderly.
You can also search with all the words in one box, such as the search box on the library home page. The database will automatically put AND in between each word.
As you build your research skills, you can utilize these search boxes to build a more advanced search, which will bring back more relevant results.
You can add additional boxes by clicking on "Add fields." Just remember that the more search terms you use, the fewer results you will get.
If you have done your initial search and you are not finding the information you need, you may need to broaden your search. There are several techniques you can try to get more results.
One option is to add additional search terms with the connector OR. This means results will contain ANY of the search terms, but not necessarily all of them.
Another option is to take out a main search term. For example, go from four to three main keywords.
Expand the publication date range. While five years is most often considered current, try searching a larger number of years. Articles on your topic may exist outside the five year range.
Finally, you may need to re-examine your research topic. Consider if your topic is too narrow. For example, perhaps you are trying to find articles on food trucks in Minnesota. You could try searching "Midwest" instead or take the geographic element out of your topic altogether.
If you run your first search and find that you have too many results, or perhaps the results are not relevant enough to your topic, you can use some tips to narrow your search.
Sometimes our main topics include multi-word keywords, such as physical therapy or young adult.
When turning these keywords into search terms, you may find that you are not getting good results that focus on these topics. This is because the database is searching for those words individually and not as one concept.
You can use quotation marks to instead search those concepts as a phrase, such as "physical therapy" and "young adult."
Let's use the concept of last in, first out, which is an accounting inventory method.
If we type our topic into the search box, we get almost one million results because the database is searching for articles that contain the four words last in first out, in no particular order.
To get better search results, we can search our topic as a phrase using quotation marks around "first in last out." This keeps the words together so the database will search as a phrase instead of individual words. When we run our search using this strategy, we now get just over 2,000 results.
If you put too many words in quotations or combine too many other search terms in addition to searching a phrase, the database will most likely not find any results.
Want to learn more and take your search skills to the next level?
Visit our Advanced Searching page to learn how to:
