Advanced Search Screens
Using Advanced Search features can help you quickly identify relevant material.
Most research databases - including Harrisburg University's Discovery Search and Google - have an advanced search screen. Unlike a basic search with one text box, advanced search screens allow you to apply various attributes to the search in order to maximize the relevance of your results.
An advanced search screen helps you explore a database efficiently to find the best research material for your project, and allows you to easily combine multiple terms into one search as shown below.
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Page Contents:
Library databases cannot process sentences or questions, so you should type no more than 3 or 4 words - or one name or concept - per line. If you need additional lines to add a term or concept, click the plus button (or "Add a Row" in some databases) to add additional lines. The more terms you add to your search, the more likely it is that your results list will be reduced.
For example:
- A search for cybersecurity with no further limits produced more than 28,000 items
- A search asking "how can artificial intelligence help with cybersecurity in quantum computing" produced ZERO results
In contrast, the search below using four terms on separate lines, when further limited to peer-reviewed articles and material published within the 12 months, produced about 500 items.
Excluding Terms from Your Search
Sometimes your search results repeatedly produce items that are irrelevant to your particular area of interest. To take these items out of your search, change the dropdown box to the left of the search box from AND to NOT and add the term or terms you want to exclude from your results list.
By clicking “Select a Field” to the right of the search boxes, you can limit your search to specific fields of the database. A field contains a specific bit of information, such as author, title of the work, year of publication, etc. If you are looking for a specific article, you can change “Select a Field” to search only through Title fields, thus getting access to the item you need more quickly. When you are looking for an exact title or name, you can type more than 3 or 4 words on the line.
The most common field limits are:
- TX All Text - Searches the entire record of each item in the database, including all titles, authors, publishers, summaries/abstracts, and subject terms. Broadest possible search, returns maximum results.
- AU Author - Searches only the author fields of each item in the database.
- TI Title - Searches book titles and journal ARTICLE titles. Does NOT search journal/magazine/newspaper titles.
- SU Subject Terms - This is a very specific type of search. Click here to learn about Subject Terms. Searching by subject terms usually reduces your results.
- SO Journal Title/Source - Searches only the titles of journals NOT journal/newspaper/magazine articles.
- AB Abstract - An abstract is a summary of the item. Abstracts are included in many of the items in the library’s databases. Searching only the abstracts can be useful when your keywords don’t necessarily appear in the titles.
- ISSN - A unique identifier number assigned to most published journals.
- ISBN - A unique 9 or 13 digit identifier assigned to most published books. Every edition of a book has a different ISBN, e.g. a hardback, paperback, and eBook of the same title will all have different ISBNs.