Video Transcripts : Advanced Search

Are your searches returning too many results? Are the results not what you expected? Try using the advanced search options in Scholar OneSearch to narrow and refine your searches.

Start an advanced search in Scholar OneSearch from your global campus portal or the library homepage. To find your campus portal click on "Global Campus Portals" under the "Have a Question" box on the library homepage, then click on your campus to see resources customized for you, including a Scholar OneSearch box with an advanced search button.

From the home page add a key term to the Scholar OneSearch box and select your location to begin. Click the red search button with a magnifying glass icon. When your search results load, click on Advanced Search after the search bar.

On the advanced search screen, you will see several options. You can use the "Any Fields" dropdown menu to search for authors, titles or subjects. Leave this option as is to search all fields. Type your search terms into the enter a search term fields. You can add new lines to expand your search or use the and dropdown menu to build powerful boolean searches. Watch the "How do I build an effective search" video to learn more.

Let's try a search together. Let's look for items that include the terms, social justice and fiction and postcolonial. We can type our search terms into the search boxes, but we need to click add a new line to make room for our third term. The Boolean operator dropdown menus automatically connect our terms with AND. We could use the any field dropdown menu to specify where we want to search, but we'll leave it as any field for now.

If You know you're looking for a specific material type, like a book or an article use the material type "All items" dropdown menu to select it. Under material type you can also limit your search to content in a specific language or published between certain dates. Let's limit our search to articles in English. When you're ready, click "Search" to see your results.

The results of your search are displayed in the main area of the page. Research is often a process of refining your searches. On the search results page you'll see your search as a sentence or a single search string above your results.

You can edit your search by selecting the element you'd like to alter, including the fields, keywords and Boolean operators. You can also add more filters from Scholar OneSearch's "Filter my results" pane on the results page. This pane gives you easy access to material type, author, and subject filters. It also includes peer reviewed source and material availability filters.

Some of these filters are only available after running your search. Click on a filter category to show the filter options. Click on the name of the filter to limit your search to a single category. To select multiple filters hover your mouse over the name of the first filter you would like to select then check the box that appears. Select as many filters as you like then click the green, "Apply filters" button at the bottom of the pane.

Once you have applied filters to your search, they will appear at the top of the filter pane under "Active filters". You can remove filters one by one with the x icon after the filter name or all at once by clicking "Reset filters". These tools can help you narrow your searches and find relevant sources.