How to search for scholarly sources

If you get too many results, there are various ways to adjust your search to get fewer and hopefully more relevant hits. First of all, consider the search terms you have used. Can you apply more specific keywords? You can also try using different functions available in most academic databases which you can learn more about on this page.

Phrase search

Use quotation marks to perform a phrase search whenever you want two or more keywords to appear in a certain order within a search. This is particularly useful when you want to search for a specific concept consisting of more than one word. For example, searching for "social media" with quotation marks around the concept will only give you results where the word social is placed right before the word media and nowhere else. 

Learn more about phrase search in this film:

Boolean operator AND

By placing the word AND (in capital letters!) between your keywords, you tell the database only to give you results where all of the selected keywords are included. For example, if you search for creativity AND work you only get results where both the word creativity and the word work occur in the text. You hereby exclude any result where only one of the keywords are mentioned. 

OBS! Note that you don't have to apply AND in LUBsearch, since the database has this function as a default setting and only presents you with results where every one of your keywords are included (unless you combine your keywords with the word OR, read more about this in the following section).

Learn more about searching with Boolean operators in this film:

2:14 minutes video by John M. Pfau Library. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ 

Field search

Databases consist of different pieces of information organized within different fields. There are fields for author(s), title, year of publication, abstract, etcetera. You can make use of this structure by searching in chosen fields to limit your searches and gain more relevant results. For example, when searching for sources written by a specific author, type the author's name in the field Author. When searching for papers on a specific topic, search for the topic within the fields Abstract, Title or Keywords. 

Learn more about field search in this film:

2:48 minutes video from University of Lethbridge Library. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en 

Filtering results

After conducting your search, you can narrow down your results to find the ones most relevant to your research question. In most databases, you have the option to filter by factors such as Year, Language, Material Type, Peer Review, Subject, and Publisher.