Tutorial Part 2: Narrowing Your Results

Adding a Term to Narrow Results

Add another term in the search box, such as "society" and re-do the search.  Now how many results come back? Did you get a similar number to the screenshot below? Chances are you got significantly fewer results when you entered an additional term.

By adding the word "society" to your search, you are narrowing your results to resources that are more relevant to our topic: How do science fiction books, TV shows, and films reflect problems in our own society as we live today?

Adding the term "society" to the search makes the results much lower - helpful

It's often useful to start with a broader search, and then skim through the results to see if you can find books and articles that are useful for your research topic. If you're finding too many unrelated results that don't answer your questions, you can experiment with adding different keywords to the search.

Narrowing your search is not about reducing your search results to the smallest number; it's about making the most targeted search so that you don't spend a long time scrolling through unrelated search results.

Some keywords will narrow the search too much, making it so you're not finding many results at all. In that case, try a synonym, or another search term that gets at the same concept. Research is all about trial and error, learning from what you see in your search results to make your next search.

 

Explore Your Results

Note that each result in the list has a label that shows what kind of source it is.

Screenshot of OneSearch interface showing the Article designation on an item in the list of results

Scroll through the results, looking for the following types of resources. Tip: OneSearch loads 10 results at a time. If you want to see more items, click "Load More Results" at the bottom of the screen.

 

Return to top to review all the content.

select next to move forward