revising your search: too many results

Two MinuteTutorials

(or less)

Revising Your Search:Too Many Results

Whenever you do a search, you should always keep in mind several considerations:

1) Variations in spelling. Even in English, think of English/American spelling, e.g. labour/labor,

or theatre/theater.

1) Spellings of foreign names, e.g. Munich/München, Peking/Beijing, Dostoyevsky/Dostoiewskij

1) Different languages. At AUR, think especially in English and Italian, e.g. Italy/Italia.

1) Think hierarchically

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to find materials when you have too many results.

In another tutorial, we will discuss how to find materials when you have too few results.

For all searches, keep these things in mind:

There are two basic types of tools for searching: 1) catalogs/indexes and 2) full-text search engines.

Each has advantages and disadvantages, but the normal problems are: in catalogs and indexes, you don’t get enough hits (or even zero), while in full-text databases, you get too many irrelevant results.

Catalog

Full-text Search Engine

First, make sure you are spelling the words correctly.

The AUR Catalog helps you to check your spelling when you get zero, or when you are looking at an individual record by letting you search in Dictionary.com.

Don’t forget the RESEARCH GUIDES, where you can find indepth help on all kinds of topics.

Take a 2-Minute Tutorial on the Research Guides.

When you get too many results, you need to limit the search in different ways. Does the database allow you to limit in any way? These limits can be more or less powerful.

Here is the search screen of JSTOR. It allows you to limit in various ways: type, language, date, and by discipline. Different databases will have lots of different options.

This is a search result from Academic Search Premier. There are different ways to limit the search compared to JSTOR, including the use of controlled vocabulary.

Controlled Vocabulary

Different Limits

Be careful with phrases. For example, “United States” will not find “U.S.” Limiting by a domain, e.g. .edu or .gov is still quite useful however.

Also, be careful of excluding words, because you don’t know exactly what will happen. For example, if you exclude the phrase “New York” because there are too many, you will also be excluding all people who work in New York, any university located in New York, anything published in New York and so on.

In most full-text databases, you can limit your search with various commands.

Putting terms in quotation marks (“”) will search for the terms in exactly that order. You can also exclude terms by adding NOT in some ways.

Limit to Recent Articles

Google Scholar’s Advanced SearchBe skeptical of the Advanced Search in Google. It does not use

controlled vocabulary, so searching by the author’s name and the journal title (publication) are highly unreliable.

Also, do not place too much trust when you limit to a specific subject area.

Think hierarchicallyMany times, it is more useful to search for narrower terms instead of

just adding extra words.

Using the Extend Search and the Library of Congress Authority File, we can find narrower terms. Here is how to do it.

Using the Extend Search, see if you can find one of your terms.

We wanted immigration and discovered the controlled

vocabulary is Emigration and immigration.

When we click on Emigration and immigration, we see something that says, Authorized, Refs & Notes.

Click on it, and you will find narrower terms that you may find useful, e.g. Brain drain, Population transfers, and so on. There is also a scope note.

For more information on using controlled vocabulary, take the

2-Minute Tutorial.

Click for more information

In addition, you can see many subject subdivisions, which will provide more specific possibilities and perhaps give you some new ideas to limit your search.

These subjects can be searched in OCLC WorldCat through the Extend Search.

Subject subdivisions

This is the next page. You can browse through these headings for quite some time.

Be aware that not all of the materials under these subjects and their subdivisions are available to everyone.

Subject subdivisions

Another way to narrow your result is to find additional terms. With free-text searching, it is important to find other terms in different ways.

Visuwords allows you to find different types of words for searching.

Click to expand and find other terms.

After you expand the terms in Visuwords, you may get some more ideas that will help narrow your results.

Finally.Putting all these methods together may do the trick.

Two MinuteTutorials

(or less)

See also: Revising Your Search: Too Few ResultsAccessing ArticlesWorking With Controlled VocabularyResearch Guides

Go to: List of Two-Minute Tutorials

Revising Your Search:Too Many Results