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 could retrieved over 23,000 results as seen below. This is more than you could reasonably evaluate and chances are most of the results will not be on you topic.
Use AND to narrow your results. This time search CLONING AND ETHICS. Notice your results have dropped to 1,132. Now your results will be more focused on your topic. You could further narrow your results by adding more KEY TERMS such as HUMANS or ANIMALS.
Now let’s refine our results even further. In the left side menu find the SEARCH WITHIN RESULTS options. From here you can limit your results to ONLY FULL TEXT results, ONLY PEER REVIEWED results, or SOURCE TYPE.
Select ONLY FULL TEXT to limit your results to only those results where the full article is included. We’re now down to 786 results.
You can also limit your results to a certain time period. In this case we will limit our results to the last five years. Slide the tab over to 2009 or enter a specific date using the pop-up calendar to limit your results to 01/01/2009-today.
We’re now down to 72 results which are focused on our topic, available in FULL TEXT, and where published between 2009 and 2016.
