Information Seeking Compass

4. Refine your search

Refine the search

If you get too many search results, you should refine the search. In general, there are very many ways to narrow your search. For example often there are a lot of different criteria or menus in the databases to choose to reduce the number of search results. For example, you may be able to set limits to publication year or the language of the publication.

Refining methods

• Publication date
• Fulltext
• Language
• Document type (book, article, dissertation etc.)
• Publication name

and many other methods!

Combination of search terms

Use Boolean operators:

• AND (narrow) use when you want ALL search terms must appear in resulting publication or document. 

For example,with terms students AND well-being you will find information on students' well-being .
 

• OR (broaden) use when you want ANY of your search terms must appear in resulting publication or document.

  
• For example, search query well-being OR "life quality" OR welfare broadens the search and produces many results.

   

• NOT (narrow) use when you want to exclude word(s) from your resulting publication or document.

  
  
  For example, search query students NOT "open university" excludes the last word from results.