Refine Your Results

There are several ways to refine your Online Articles search without even changing your search terms. The options are all in the left hand panel of the results screen.

• Limit your search by the publication date of the articles by using the slider or entering dates. Your instructor should tell you the date range that is acceptable for your paper/project.

• Limit by the Subject Terms assigned to the articles in the results list. The More link allows you to see all of the subject headings and to include/exclude them from your search.

• Limit by Content Type (journal article, newspapers, etc.) and Language.

If after refining your topic you still have too many articles, then add another word to your search terms. If you have too few articles, then remove a word from your search terms.

Do Further Refining with Advanced Search

You can do further refining to your search in the Advanced Search of Online Articles. Look for the Advanced Search link to the right of the Search button on the results screen.

Some of the many additional search limits available are:

• author
• words in the title
• ISBN/ISSN, DOI
• publication
• excluding from results: newspaper articles, book reviews, or dissertations/theses

NOTE: Advanced Search is particularly useful when you have a partial citation and need to find an article.

Identify Source Databases

When you look at the Preview for an article, you can find out from which database(s) the Online Articles searched pulled the article. Look for the Source in the Preview. In this case, the article was found in PubMed and MEDLINE.

You may want to use the hyperlinks to go directly to the database(s) and search there. Many individual databases have specialized limitations and refinements that allow you to retrieve more relevant results than you can with Online Articles.