 Hi, this is Mary Wisner from the Gallagher Law Library at the University of Washington School of Law. How can you focus your search so that you don't get a zillion results? Big tip here is to take advantage of the way the documents are structured in the database. Just as in your contacts list, there's a field for name and a field for email. In databases, there's always a way that documents are structured. Here's an example. If we're looking for Washington cases involving the Department of Ecology, we might just search for Department of Ecology. In Lexis, that gets 986 cases. But that includes some cases like this one, where one of the judges cites a case about the Department of Ecology, but the case itself seems to be about bankers. So that's not what we want. Solution. Look for the advanced search option in Lexis, and then they will give you a template showing you different fields that you can use. In this case, I'm going to search for Department of Ecology to be the party name. Now we get just 270 cases. Down from 986, that's much more efficient. Here's another example. Suppose I'm curious about cases where Hugh Spitzer was counseled for one of the parties. I can search for Hugh within two words of Spitzer. Using W2, by the way, is a way to cover whether he uses a middle initial or a middle name. So that's often a good way to be flexible searching for names, doing first name within two words of the last name. Anyway, we run this search and we get 72 cases. Has he been counseled for 72 cases? Well, it includes cases that cite his publications. So for instance, here's one citing an article he wrote in the Seattle University Law So it's interesting, but it's not where he was counseled. We go into that advanced search template and we see that there's an option searching for attorney name. And now we see 27 cases down from 72, much more efficient. Let's switch to Westlaw for an example. What if we're looking for Washington cases about self-defense as a defense in assault? Just searching for self-defense and assault gives us over 1600 cases. If we click on advanced search, we see that Westlaw has a template that we can fill in. And I want to look for self-defense and assault to be in either the synopsis or the digest field. Now we get 266 down from 1636, so it's much more focused. The synopsis is the section at the front of the case where the West editors summarize the case. They give the background and the holdings. The digest field is the head notes, the one-sentence summaries of points of law tied into the West topics and key numbers. We'll talk about these in another lesson. But for now, notice that this helps make sure that our terms are in an important part of the case where the editors have determined this is what the case is about. One more example, law review articles about quarantine for infectious diseases. If I go into the law journal library in Heinon Line and I search for quarantine and infectious, I get 3,234 results. If I say show me your advanced search options, I can look for infectious and then require quarantine to be in the article title. Now I have just 87 results down from 2,300, and so it's much more focused. I would rather skim through 87 titles than 2,300. Notice that this first article is from 1909. That highlights that Heinon Line has law journals generally back to volume one of the journal, often going back to the 19th century. It's a much longer scope of coverage than Lexis or Westlaw. Sometimes if you only want recent materials, you might consider searching with a date range looking at the last 10 years or last 15 years. Now what has been the commonality in these different examples? No matter whether we were looking at Lexis or Westlaw or Heinon Line, we were able to click on an advanced search option and get to a template that let us focus on the different fields. This is true in a lot of different databases, not just the three databases I've shown you today. Again, this has been Mary Wisner from the Gallagher Law Library. For library services, research guides, and more, go to our website, lib.law.uw.edu.