Searching in the library's Discovery tool can be overwhelming at first. Remember that when you search Discovery, you're searching all of the library's 100ish databases, which include thousands of journals/ebooks, and millions of articles and book chapters. This can be a good thing because you're searching information from multiple perspectives, however it also means that you will get a LOT of results. For example, let's say that I'm interested in using gun control as my debatable topic. When I search these keywords in Discovery, I find over 770,000 results!
So what can I do to have a more focused search with a more manageable number of results?
First off, remember that when you're searching for phrases you can put quotation marks around the phrase to tell the search engine that you want it to think of your keywords as one idea. Without quotation marks, the search engine looks for the word gun and the word control anywhere they might be but with quotation marks, it's only finding the two words together. By using quotation marks, I brought my search results down to about 122,000.
Another tip for savvy searching is trying to add additional keywords. Gun Control is a pretty big topic that someone could write an entire dissertation on. Your assignment is only for a 5-page paper so you likely need to focus on one aspect of gun control. Do you want to focus on handguns or automatic rifles or a tool that can be used for gun control like waiting periods or background checks? Reading those nice reference sources we talked about can help you identify a more focused aspect of your topic. For my example, I'm going to look at background checks. Here's how I modified my search:
With the addition of my 2nd search term (which is a phrase so I put it in quotation marks), we are now down to about 15,000 search results. Still too high but we're definitely getting closer. You could continue adding or changing keywords but at this point, I am going to try using my filters to help narrow my results even more. What do I mean by filters?
Filters are the options you'll see on the left side of your screen when you search in Discovery, or really almost any search engine. You can think of these like online shopping. For every choice you make, you're filtering out search options that don't meet your information need and narrowing your results to the types that do meet your information need. The top two filters that students use are "Full Text" and "Peer Reviewed". These filters can be helpful but I caution you against checking them automatically.
When you choose "Full Text" you are limiting yourself to only the information that are in the library databases that are immediately accessible as a PDF or HTML document. You are losing, any information that is in the library or available through Interlibrary Loan (ILL). Use this filter with caution because you might lose out on a fabulous article on your topic that you could get through ILL.
When you check the "Peer Reviewed" filter you are limiting yourself to only the articles who meet the very strict definition of peer review. For the purposes of this assignment, you are not limited to peer-reviewed articles. You are allowed to use any article as long as it is credible and substantial. That could include magazines and newspapers which are the types of search results you'll lose if you limit to only peer reviewed articles.
The last filter, that can be very helpful is the "Publication Date" filter. With all debatable topics the arguments around those topics evolve and change over the years. Likely what we thought about something 50 or 100 years ago is probably not the prevailing thinking about a topic now. If you can see from the screenshot for my search on gun control Discovery found results from 1901-2022. If I was doing a dissertation on gun control, it might be helpful for me to see how the conversation around this issue has evolved since 1901 but for a 5-page paper, I probably only need to look at the last 10 or 20 years of thinking on a topic. So I'm going to change my Publication Date filter to show only results from 2012-2022. This change brings me down to about 12,500 search results.
At this point, you might want to take a high level look at the first few search results on your list. You can do this by clicking on the title which will open a detailed record for the item. Once you have that open, look at the title, the subject terms, and the abstract. Here is a detailed record for my top search result.
Based on what you see here, can you tell if you're on the right track? For me, this article looks very promising and I see the names of some specific legislation that came out in 2019 so perhaps I want to try to further focus my search on those pieces of legislation. If the search results you have found, don't match what you're looking for you probably need to rethink some of your search terms and filter choices.
This could also be the perfect time to ask a librarian for help. Searching is an exploration and you're rarely going to get the perfect article on your first try. So be persistent and creative as you think about the best way to find information on your topic. Don't give up and ask for help when you get really stuck!