 Ever find yourself with this problem? You're starting on a research project. Let's say the question, how do drugs affect your body? You go to your favorite search engine, type in the question, and the result is thousands or even millions of hits. But you don't want lots of results. You want great results that are appropriate, scholarly sources for your research project. How do you get those results? I'll give you four suggestions on how to get what you're looking for. Suggestion one, use a research database to narrow your results to only scholarly materials. A link to our databases can be found on our library homepage at the databases tab on the left. I'll show you how to narrow to only scholarly sources in just a second. Using the psych info database as an example, we'll type in our question, how do drugs affect your body? Although we're using a research database, we're now getting too few results. If we look closely at the titles, we also see that they're not very relevant to our question. The problem here is that the database doesn't recognize the question. As an example, we'll type a specific drug, caffeine, into the search box and we'll narrow our results to only scholarly articles by checking the peer-reviewed box below. And that's our third recommendation, narrow results to only peer-reviewed or scholarly articles. Our previous search returned 3,013 results, better than a broad search over the web, but still too many. We need to narrow down our results even further. Suggestion 4, narrow your results using related searches or subject terms. If we look at the top of the screen in psych info, we see it provides some related searches and if we click caffeine and emotional states, we narrow our results down to 142. However, this suggestion may not be to a topic you're interested in. On our previous results page at the right hand side, we see an area to narrow by subject. Expanding the plus sign, then expanding even more brings us to a number of subject terms we could use to narrow our results. For example, we could tell the database to include results with the specific subject terms sleep disorders and caffeine. Now our results have been narrowed down to 30 scholarly articles. Once you become more familiar with your research topic and the terminology, you can get similar results by setting up your search to look in the subject field at the outset. Most of our research databases have similar features to help you narrow. This should ensure that you get great results that are relevant, scholarly and precise. To review, we just looked at how to get great results by narrowing your search using a research database with specific words or ideas by limiting to peer-reviewed articles and by using specific subject terms. If you have any questions, ask us at library.wlu.ca. www.llu.ca.