 So you're working on your research paper, and maybe you found a few articles in a library database that are useful, but you need to find more. What do you do? This video will show you how you can refine your search to find additional articles. Let's say your research topic was something like, what effect does stress have on college students? You've already learned how to select keywords from your research question, so you should be looking at this question and thinking that stress and college students are our central ideas, and may be a good place to begin searching. Let's go ahead and jump back into our database academic search complete, and run an initial search using these keywords. Remember from the search page, no matter what stage of research you're in, you always want to select that scarly peer-reviewed journals checkbox. Let's take a look at this initial result. Some of them look good, like this first article is suggesting a particular approach to reducing stress using animal therapy, but others don't seem very relevant. For example, the second one down talks about post-traumatic stress symptoms in college students. That's not what we meant to search. What does this tell us about the keywords that we initially entered? They're too broad. Also an indication of this is how many search results we got. We got over 3,000. That's way too many to begin looking through at this phase of our research. We need to narrow down our search. One way we can narrow a search in order to retrieve more relevant results is by adding some additional search terms. Stress in college students are too big of a topic. We might want to look at specific ways in which stress might be managed, or we might want to look at a specific age group within the category of college students to help narrow down our results a bit. We're going to start with there. Say we want to look at stress management in first year students only. We're going to type in our keyword first year students, but also some potential synonyms of this group, such as or freshman or freshman plural. Limiters such as age, geography or location, a specific community, or even gender can be great ways to take a really broad question and start to slowly narrow it down. Before we click search, we're going to add one more search term to our two related ideas that we have right now to make sure that we're still only keeping our question within the context of a college or a university. So let's go ahead and click search and see how our results change. So we're doing a little better. Now instead of 3,500 results, we're down to about 600. But how is the relevancy of our results doing? We're getting closer in that our information seems to mostly be around first year college students, but the results are still kind of all over the page. We're getting a lot of different kind of information about different forms of stress within college students. So maybe the last step that we might want to do for our initial research is to narrow down what kind of stress that it is that we're talking about. To help me figure out some of these ways in which we can narrow it down, I'm going to take a look at the titles of the articles that I'm seeing in these results. For example, number six here is about scoping with self-efficacy and academic stress. That's interesting. Before I was talking about stress in general, but maybe what I really am interested is just academic stress. So we could add that as our third kind of narrower keyword within our search. So now let's go ahead and click search again. Now we're getting a much more specific set of results. We're down to about 44. And you'll notice just by glancing at some of the titles of these particular articles, they're much closer to our ultimate research question that we might be asking. So that's an example of how we take a really broad idea like stress in college students and work with different forms of keywords to narrow down our results. But what if you have the opposite problem? What if we're searching using keywords and nothing comes up? If you aren't getting any results, think in more generalized terms that you could use to express your ideas. For example, asking a research question about how students at Gordon College manage their stress is way too narrow. We won't get any results if we type in Gordon College and stress into any database. But instead, we could ask a question about institutions that are like Gordon College, such as other liberal arts colleges or universities or even Christian colleges or universities. So we're still keeping our question within the context of what Gordon is like and the students that are at Gordon, but we're asking a bigger question of a tool like a database to find more relevant results. After you've spent some time looking at some particular articles, the next thing that I would recommend is that you go straight to that person's bibliography or work cited page. And you can do that by opening up the full text of that article and then scrolling right to their bibliography list. That's usually contained at the end of their article. This gives you a list of all the research these particular articles consulted while they were working on their research. Looking at people's bibliography is going to be a great way to not only figure out where you're going to go next, maybe you'll get some ideas about some potential books that are out there or other scholarly articles that you can use. But it's also a great way to look and see what the scholarly conversation is around your particular topic. How have other scholars before you who are asking similar questions come up with the same ideas? Hopefully what you're learning through this is that research is a process. Work with different keywords and search techniques to broaden or narrow your results as necessary. Use the sources you're finding in people's bibliographies as a roadmap for where to go next, and keep repeating the process. Remember that librarians are always available to help you if you need further direction on how to refine your search.