Making Your Search More Broad or Narrow

What do you do if your search retrieves only a few results or none at all? Or, what do you do if your search retrieves hundreds of results? What if many of these results don't really address your topic?

Before getting into what broadening and narrowing can do for your search strategy, let's look at some examples:

Sometimes making your search terms more broad or narrow can help in situations like these. Here's an example of how a term can be made more broad or narrow:

Your search strategy can also be too broad or narrow. In general, the more terms included in a search strategy, the more narrow it is and the fewer results you will get, though these results may be highly relevant. In contrast, fewer terms in a strategy mean a broader search, and therefore more results. A large number or results, however, can mean that many will not be relevant to your research.

Too few results?

If you're using a search strategy that's very narrow you may not get many results. This can be because few articles use your narrow term, or few mention all of the concepts you included in your search strategy. For example, it may be possible to find a few articles on women managers in Missouri firms that manufacture food products, but you might find even more articles by broadening your search as shown below:

The articles found with a broader search strategy may address your topic in a more general way, or they may only focus on one aspect of your topic, but they are still relevant. Broadening your search means using a strategy to catch these relevant articles that refer to your topic in the broader sense.

Too many results?

If your search strategy is too broad you may get a large number of results that have little to do with your research topic. In this case you may need to use more specific terms or add terms to your search strategy. This will insure that your results actually focus on the topic you're interested in.

For example, what if your search for the topic "eating disorders" retrieves 300 articles? This is far too many results to look through. Suppose that you are really only interested in anorexia. Try searching for the term anorexia, which is more narrow than "eating disorders." What if you really want to know how anorexia affects adolescent girls? Try narrowing your search even more by adding an additional term: anorexia and adolescent girls.

It may help to ask yourself the following questions when narrowing your search:

• What do I want to know about my topic? (causes of anorexia, or treatments for anorexia)
• Is there a specific kind of person/place/thing I want to relate my topic to? (anorexia as it applies to adolescent girls)
• Is there a specific type or variety of my topic that I can name? (anorexia is a specific type of eating disorder)