Evaluate your search results critically

4. Too many results

If your search gives you too many results, make the search more specific. Instead of using a simple search, try Advanced Search, which allows you to limit and refine your results more precisely.

You can limit your results to:

• peer-reviewed articles;
• full-text documents;
• a specific publication period;
• a certain document type;
• selected search fields (such as title, abstract, keywords, author, or publication title).

Searching in selected fields can make your results more relevant. For example, if your search term appears in the title, keywords, or abstract, the document is more likely to be closely related to your topic.

You can also make your search more focused by using the following techniques:

• Use phrase searching. Put words that must appear together in quotation marks, for example, "academic libraries".
• Use the AND operator to build a more specific search query, for example, "academic libraries" AND "artificial intelligence" AND ethics.
• Use narrower subject-specific terms instead of broad general terms.
• Using truncation, avoid cutting the word too short. A longer word stem gives more precise results. For example, computer* is more specific than comput*.
• Use a proximity operator, such as NEAR, when you want two words to appear close to each other but not necessarily in a fixed order. 

• Web of Science uses NEAR/n
• Scopus uses W/n
• EBSCOhost uses Nn
• IEEE Xplore uses NEAR/n