Suppose your professor has given you an assignment to find an article discussing the ethics of cloning. Your first step is to determine your KEY TERMS. In this case they are CLONING and ETHICS.
If you perform a search for CLONING you would retrieve over 976,000 results as seen below. This is more than you could reasonably evaluate and chances are most of the results will not be on your topic.
Use AND to narrow your results. This time search CLONING AND ETHICS. Notice your results have dropped to 48,000 and they will be more focused on your topic. You could further narrow your results by adding more KEY TERMS such as HUMANS or ANIMALS if you wanted to be more specific.
Now let’s refine our results even further. In the left side menu find the REFINE BY options. From here you can limit your results to Date, Article Type, Journal, or Subject Area. The number next to each refinement tells you how many results meet that criteria. For example, 2,442 articles will have a publication date of 2021 or 28,559 are in the field of Medicine and Dentistry. As you select boxes the totals in the remaining boxes will adjust.
