This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License. | Details of our policySometimes you'll find that your initial search yields too many results to be meaningful to you. In that case, you may employ one or more of the following techniques to narrow down your search so that you get more focused results.
Adding new concepts to your search or changing your choice or words can dramatically shift the number of results. If you were initially searching for just media AND ethics, but were getting far too many results, try adding in a third concept, such as confidentiality to narrow your results.
Searching for your terms as subject headings instead of keywords ensures that your results are centrally about a particular concept instead of happening to include the words. Frequently this will also reduce the number of results you receive.
Most databases include various kinds of search limits such as source type, date, and language. These can be used to narrow your results. You also might find it helpful to limit to peer reviewed sources if your professor as asked you to use only scholarly sources.
When you search words independently, you will frequently get more results than if you search them as an exact phrase. For instance, media ethics and "media ethics" will give you differing results in most databases.
If you've tried all of the narrowing tactics in a database and are still getting far too many results, you may need to narrow your topic further. Consider answering who, what, when, where, why, and how as they apply to your initial topic to see whether the answers to those questions can help you hone in on a more appropriately sized topic.
If you need assistance with your search, please reach out to the library for help.
In other cases you may find that your searches are retrieving too few results. In that case, you may employ one or more of the following techniques to broaden your search so that you get more results.
Sometimes you may receive too few results because you're trying to find too many concepts all at once. When this happens, you can remove one or more keywords from your search to see if that increases your results. If you are researching a complex or multifaceted topic, you may need to search for different aspects of it in separate searches. For instance, if media AND ethics AND confidentiality AND celebrity brought back too few results, then try omitting at least one of your terms.
You might find that your search term is not the term preferred by a particular database. In that case, you may benefit by brainstorming additional words that get at the same concept. Rather than searching only for ethics try searching for (ethics OR morals OR integrity). Use the Boolean OR operator to connect synonyms and other related terms within one search box or set of parentheses.
By truncating a word with an asterisk (*), you will instruct the database to bring back alternate endings. For instance, a search for ethic* will retrieve ethics, ethical, ethically, and ethicist, among other word endings.
If you've tried all of the broadening tactics in a database and are still getting far too few results, you may need to broaden your topic. Consider whether there is a somewhat larger related topic that you might research instead. For instance, if you are unable to find existing scholarship on "how the use of confidential informants in college newspaper reporting at Georgetown University impacts student trust," then you might broaden to look for scholarship on "how the use of confidential informants impacts public trust in contemporary newspapers" instead.
If you need assistance with your search, please reach out to the library for help.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License. | Details of our policy