Robbins Library Notes

This week’s post on searching will focus on search limiters. Using search limiters is a useful way to focus a search so as to obtain more relevant results.

What They Are

What are search limiters? They include, but are not limited to:

• Date range: Setting the search to look for all articles on a topic published “Between 1990 and 1999,” or “After 2001.”
• Type of source: Limiting the search to a specific format or medium, which may be a book review, an article, a book, a manuscript, or a networked resource.
• Language: Limiting results to English only, or another language, depending on the search.
• Author: Limiting results to a specific author, e.g., looking for all articles by Bernard Williams on the topic of ethics.
• Individual source: Limiting the search to a specific journal or publication, such as the Journal of Symbolic Logic or Social Philosophy & Policy.
• Boolean operators: Using operators like AND, OR, and NOT to include or exclude terms in a search string.
• Quotation marks: Enclosing terms in quotation marks in Google searches the terms as a phrase, rather than as Google’s default Boolean AND search. So, searching “bodily awareness” will turn up results with these two words next to each other as a phrase, rather than the latter search, which may turn the two words next to each other, but will more likely only find instances of “bodily” and “awareness” on the same page, and not necessarily near each other.

Why Use Them?

As I noted above, search limiters are a great way to focus a search such that you return more relevant results. Rather than getting back a long list of mostly useless resources, because they’re in the wrong language, or because they’re too old, or because they’re the wrong medium (e.g., book reviews instead of articles), or because they’re irrelevant, and so forth.

How to Use Them

To use search limiters, you will generally need to use the advanced search screen in a database, or the Expanded Search Screen in HOLLIS.

For the most part, you will not need to set many limiters. In fact, it’s often a good idea to set only two or three at most. Why? If you set too many limiters, you may return few or no results, because the search is too restrictive.

Also, setting limiters works best when you have a specific item that you’re looking for, or a very focused search. They are less useful when your search is more general, since they may reduce the number of relevant items returned.

Let’s look at an example, to see how using limiters can help you with research. The first part of the example will run a search without limiters:

You are doing some research on Ludwig Wittgenstein, and want to read Ray Monk’s biography, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. You want to know if Robbins Library has a copy of this book. So, going to HOLLIS, and using the default basic search screen, you enter in the terms “monk” and “wittgenstein” in the search box, which defaults to a keyword search. You hit enter, and receive eight results back: one of which is a musical score; three of which are other books by Monk on Wittgenstein, but not the one you’re looking for; one of which is the book, but in a German translation; and three of which are the book. You click through these, and discover that the sixth record indicates that Robbins does indeed have the book.

Now, let’s run the search, but use the Expanded Search Screen and some limiters:

On the Expanded Search Screen page, you enter “monk” into the first box, and set it to search “Author Words.” In the second box, you enter in “wittgenstein,” and set it to search “Title Words.” (You also could enter in “duty” or “genius,” instead of “wittgenstein,” here.) In the “Locations” box, located below the search terms search, select “Robbins Philosophy.” Run the search, and you receive the one record that you need, indicating that Robbins does have the book.

Rather than having to sort through irrelevant and extraneous records, you found what you needed right away simply by adding three limiters to the search.

Another option in the Expanded Search Screen in HOLLIS is to search two-word phrases in the search boxes. This can be helpful if you want to find, for example, Robbins’ holdings of Galen Strawson’s work, but not those of Peter Strawson.

A Caveat

Different databases offer different search limiters. Even in HOLLIS, the options for search limiters change, depending on whether you are search the entire collection, journals only, or electronic resources only. So, what works in one database may not apply in another. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the quirks and idiosyncrasies of limiters in the databases that you commonly use.

Summary

As stated at the beginning, using search limiters can be a helpful way to refine your searching, so as to save yourself time and effort, and increase the number of relevant results.