OneSearch will almost always find something about your topic. Most of the time that's good, since it gives you a starting point for your research. However, many people feel that OneSearch finds too many results, and they need to narrow them down before they can decide which ones to use in a project.
Let's go back to our 51,947 results about college athletes:
Fortunately, OneSearch has options that will allow you to easily narrow down your search results. The most common ones are on your screen, below the search box:
"Full Text" will show items where you can read the entire piece, right now.
"Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" are journals that have a peer-review process.
The "All time" dropdown menu will allow you to choose items that were published in the past 12 months, past 5 years, past 10 years, or all time (the default).
The "Source type" dropdown menu will allow you to choose different types of sources: magazines, news, academic journals, trade publications, reviews, reports, eBooks, books, conference materials, electronic resources, primary source documents, biographies, dissertations/theses, and more.
As you click and choose these options, the number of search results will change. For example, specifying peer-reviewed academic journal articles published in the last 5 years makes things much more manageable, with only 4,392 results:
If that's still too many, more options are available under the "All filters" button.
OneSearch offers many options to refine and narrow your search. We'll walk through all of them below.
When you first click the "All filters" button, a panel will open on the right side of your screen. This panel will show your active filters, which are the ones that you had already selected:
Other options that you'll see are:
"Full Text" will show items where you can read the entire piece, right now.
"Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" returns scholarly content, including original research studies.
"Catalog Only" finds items that are in our library catalog but not in the databases that are included in OneSearch. Catalog items will be mostly print books, ebooks, DVDs, and Blu-Rays.
"PDF Full Text" is a more specific version of the "Full Text" option. If you choose this one, it will show you only items that are available in full text and the full text is a .pdf file, not an .html file or al inked version.
"Available in Library Collection" should limit to items you can access either online or in print through our library. The system is not perfect; you may still get some false hits.
The "Published Date" filter gives you more options for the date of the source. Instead of the default options that we saw on the first results page, you now have the option to set a Custom range. For example, to find an article from 2019, enter 01/01/2019 as the starting date and 12/31/2019 as the ending date.
The "Content Provider" filter allows you to choose which database(s) you want to see results from. Think of this like setting up a custom search, where you can say you want to see information from nursing databases and psychology databases but not history databases. Click the "+ more" link to see all the databases.
The "Source Types" filter will be the same as you saw on your initial results page. Note that the only possible source types are the ones that are showing up in your search results right now.
The "Subject" filter will allow you to narrow your search results to only source that use the displayed subject term(s). Similar to the source types, the only options for subjects will be ones that are used for your results right now. This filter often narrows your search too much, so use it sparingly. It can be more helpful for generating ideas of different keywords to search for.
The "Publisher" and "Publication" filters allows you to choose only certain journals that are published by certain publishers. For example, if you only want to see journals that are published by the company Elsevier, you can check the box. Or if you know you're only interested in articles from the Journal of Athletic Training, published by Allen Press, you can check that box.
The "Language" filter allows you to include or exclude items in specific languages. This filter is most helpful if you only read one or two languages fluently and need your materials to be published in those languages.
The "Geography" filter always sounds like it should be more helpful than it is. Theoretically, what it's supposed to do is show you results that are about a particular country (which may or may not be the country or language that the article was published in). However, in practice, it often seems to remove results that would have been helpful for you but didn't have the correct information in the Geography field. Therefore, we recommend using it sparingly.
