 This video covers how to narrow your search if you are getting too many search results and how to broaden your search if you aren't getting enough search results. Sometimes when you search for something in a library database, you get thousands of results, which is overwhelming to read. Instead of getting overwhelmed, you can use ways of narrowing your search to help you get only relevant results. Keywords are one way to help you narrow your search. Let's say you are writing a paper on the effect technology has on child development. You can put child development into the first search bar and get over 300,000 results, which is way too many. You can narrow it down by using technology as a second search term, which will bring your search results down to over 17,000, which is still too many. You can narrow your search even further by focusing on a related term, an age range, or even a specific type of technology. By replacing technology with a more specific term such as television, your results become more manageable. As you search, you may discover new keywords and might need to revise keywords based on database results. Let's say you find one or two articles you are interested in. You might scour the article's abstracts and subjects to harvest some new keywords to try in future searches. While 2,000 is a much more reasonable number, you can narrow your results even further by using the database limiters to refine your results. Limiters are located on the left-hand side of the page. Some helpful limiters include scourly, peer-reviewed journals, publication date, and source types. Scourly articles go through a peer-reviewed process to make sure the information contained within them is accurate. This filter is also useful if your assignment requires you to use peer-reviewed sources. Limiting the publication date allows you to ensure you are getting the most current available information on your topic. Source types are useful if you want to view popular sources like magazines and newspapers to find introductory information on a topic. While choosing keywords and refining your results will help you narrow your search, sometimes you may have the opposite problem and can't find enough sources. This can happen when you have a very specific or current topic. Let's say you're writing a paper on parking at USU, which is very specific. You may not be able to find results on parking in Utah State University, even though these are great keywords. However, if you replace Utah State University with a broader term like university, you may have more luck. You can search all variations of keyword at once by changing and to or in your search. For example, you could search university or campus. Searching this way allows you to find sources containing either of the two keywords. If you need additional help narrowing or broadening your search, you can always ask a librarian.