Suppose your professor has given you an assignment to find an article discussing the recent outbreak of the ZIKA VIRUS and its entry in to the UNITED STATES. Your first step is to determine your KEY TERM(S) or KEYWORDS. In this case you would want to start with ZIKA VIRUS and UNITED STATES. Other KEYWORDS which could also be useful would be: FIRST CASE, SPREAD, CDC, TRANSMISSION, or other terms that could be associated with your topic.
There are two ways you can approach this search. Method 1 uses the built in features of AWN to narrow your results while Method 2 relies on more traditional KEYWORD searching. Each method will bring you similar but slightly different results.
** For more information on BASIC SEARCHING techniques, check out our guide to SEARCHING.
Since we already know we are looking for articles about the United States we can limit our search to articles published in US sources.
From the AWN homepage we can do a search typing the KEYWORDS Zika virus in the Search Box and clicking search.
Below you can see there are over 100,000 articles mentioning the Zika virus but we haven't yet limited our results to jut sources in the United States.
To limit the results to the United States we will need to use one of the filters in the left side menu to first limit them to North America (83,000+ results)..
Once your results update you can then select USA (80,000+ results).
A search for ZIKA VIRUS in US newspapers gives us over 40,000 articles.
By default articles are presented in chronological order, giving you the newest articles first. This may be useful when trying to find the latest information on a topic but since we are looking for an event that happened in the past we probably don't want to browse through 2,000 articles looking for one that covers our topic. Instead we can use the SORT BY feature, found in the top right of your results, to sort the articles by "Best Match". This will bring forward the articles that should be most likely to be on our topic.
METHOD 2:
In the first method we did a search for Zika virus and then narrowed our results to the United States. It is also possible to choose the your location first then run your search. To do so click on the Advanced Search option on the Access World News homepage.
From here you can scroll down and select the region of the world you would like to search.
Then you can select the specific country you would like to search. If you want to search more than one region you can click the check boxes to select multiple regions.
