FirstSearch:  An Online Introduction

Limiting Searches:  A Way to Improve Your Results

After you perform a search, you can Limit your Search to improve your Results.

Here's an example from CINAHL.
Let's say we searched "nursing w students"
(Remember:  "nursing w students" means we will retrieve items in which the phrase "nursing students" appears.)

That search retrieves over 1,800 Records.

We can Limit the Search to narrow our Results.

To Limit a Search:
1.  Click the "Limit Search" button.

FirstSearch now shows us the categories we can limit by.
The categories vary from database to database.
For CINAHL we can limit by Years (years of publication) and Type (type of material).

We can also choose to Limit by Subject Heading.
Limiting by Subject Heading is exactly the same as using Related Subjects, which we saw in the last lesson.

Let's Limit our Search by Years to only things published in 1997 through 1998.
2.  We type 1997-1998 in the Years box.
And we Limit by Type to Journal, for Journal articles.
3.  We click in the Type box and click on Journal.

FirstSearch takes our 1,800 Results and Limits them to only journal articles published in 1997 through 1998.
That retrieves 164 Records.

We could even Limit that search again if we wanted to--for example, to only 1998 articles.

Next:  The History function

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