This video shows you how to narrow your results
in OneSearch. I’ve used the same search “bipolar disorder”
adolescents that I used in the first video.
Note that I’ve gotten almost 22,000 results for
that search—that is too many to go through. The light grey column on the left has many ways
to refine your search and limit those results to a
more manageable number. I have found one of the most useful options to be
“Publication Date” near the bottom of the
column. For certain topics and subject areas, sources
published more than just 7 or 10 years ago are
considered out of date, and some professors may specifically ask you to limit your search to
very recent sources. I’ll indicate that I only
want sources published between 2003 and 2013. Now let’s move to the top of the column. You
can click “Items with full text online” to remove
any results that are citation only or from our print collection. Do keep in mind that doing so will
remove almost all books from your search, as
most of those are still available only in print! If a professor has requested scholarly journal
articles, also known as academic journal
articles, click on this box to automatically limit to that category.
You can have even more control over what types
of sources show up in your results by using the
“Content Type” box. You can either target specific types of sources to include, say books
or newspaper articles, or ones you want to
exclude, maybe book reviews. Finally, all sources in OneSearch are assigned
one or more “Subject Terms”. These terms
indicate what topics each result focuses on. For instance, I can look through these subject
headings and click on ones that include some
aspect of “bipolar disorder”, like these. This way I can ensure that bipolar disorder is the
main topic of each book or article, not just
something that is mentioned briefly in passing. I can also exclude articles that deal with
aspects that are not of interest to me, for
instance, it appears that many of the articles in my original results address schizophrenia in
addition to bipolar disorder. I’m not interested in schizophrenia, so I will
exclude all results that have that subject term.
By limiting my date range to the last 10 years
and choosing specific subject terms, I’ve
reduced my results down to fewer than 3000.