The Concept of "Limiters"
A keyword search is the best to start with CrossSearch, but once you get your first list of results, you will have many limiters available to you. A limiter is a tool that narrows down a large number of results to something more manageable -- think of it like shopping Amazon by department. CrossSearch often brings up thousands of results. This is a problem because:
- No one wants to go through thousands of results.
- While CrossSearch ranks the results by relevance, this is based on a computer algorithm that may or may not get it right. So the first page of results may not all be the best results.
- Large result sets tend not to be narrowly focused. Limiters allow you to decide what emphasis you want to make in your results. For example, do you want to focus on scholarly sources? Items published during a specific time period? etc.
Types of Limiters Available
Other limiters are available under the + More Limits option. These include:
Limiters in Practice
Here is an example to show the value of limiters.
Our initial search gets over 1 million results! How can we make this more manageable?
After limiting to Scholarly/Peer-Reviewed sources: 582,932
After limiting to Academic Journals only: 569, 692
After limiting to items published in the last 5 years (since 2014): 292, 980
After limiting to items published in English: 290, 958
From here, there are a few different ways you can progress:
- Skim the first page of results to get a feel for what's coming up, what's missing, and what other ways you may want to refine your search;
AND/OR
- Use Subject limiters to focus your results even further. Ex:
After limiting to results about climate change mitigation: 6, 125
AND/OR
- Try adding another search term or terms to your search. Note that you may have to reset some limiters after doing so. Ex -
After adding "Arctic" to the same search: 9, 786
AND/OR
- Limit by selecting a specific database and continuing your search there. Ex -
After limiting to the GreenFILE environmental studies database: 22, 035
