Search Advice

Refining Your Search Results

Once you've found documents, you may decide you want to refocus your search to find different results or narrow it to shorten your Results list.

Consider these tips for refining your Search Results:

Use the suggestions in the Smart Search area, if available.
Decrease the number of documents on your list by adjusting the date range you're searching.
Limit your results by searching for only those documents available as full text.
Combine your search words with others using operators.
Run your search again using more specific or complete search words. A search for Bush is likely to find documents dealing with both US Presidents George Bush and George W. Bush as well as documents on with the Australian outback and other subjects, while a search for George W. Bush should limit your search to documents dealing with the younger President Bush.
Add phrases (surrounded by quotation marks if they are three words or longer) to your search, combining both keywords and specific phrases to get the information you're most interested in. For example, you might combine "First Amendment rights" with music industry, intellectual property, or Napster.
(Note:Two-word phrases, such as music industry and intellectual property, don't require quotation marks.)

If you found very few, or no, documents, consider these tips for broadening your search:

Broaden your search by combining you search words with a new word or phrase using OR. This strategy will help you find additional documents.
Try your search again using synonyms for the search words you first entered.
Try your search again using different forms of the search words you used, such as plurals or other endings. You can find more relevant documents by modifying your search words using truncation and wildcard characters.
If you're searching in Citations and Abstracts, try the same search in Citation and document text.
If you're searching within the last several days or months, try the same search again with a longer time frame.
If you're searching only one or two collections, use Databases Selected to add another database or to search ALL available collections.
Remove any limit to Full text documents or Peer reviewed.
If you're using Basic Search, don't enter a question or long sentence. Instead, use the AND operator to link important words of the sentence together. For example, instead of What is the largest continent on Earth?, search for largest AND continent AND earth.